Chartism

m

CHAETISM

BY

THOMAS CAELYLE

*-It never smokes but there Is fire." — Oijj Proverb

NEW YORK:
JOHN B. ALDEN, PUBLISHER,

1885.

TROWS

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY,

NEW YORK.

COISTTEISTTS

Chap. I. Condition-of -England Question,

II. Statistics, ....

III. New Poor-Law, .

IV. Finest Peasantry in the World,
V. Rights and Mights, .

VI. Laissez-Faire, ....

VII. Not Laissez-Fah-e,

VIII. New Eras, ....

IX. Parliamentary Radicalism,

X. Impossible, ....

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68
72

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in 2008 with funding from

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CHARTISMS-

CHAPTER I.

CONDITION-OF-ENGLAND QUESTION.

A feeling very generally exists that the condition and dis-
position of the working Classes is a rather ominous matter at
present ; that something ought to be said, something ought
to be done, in regard to it. And surely at an e]DOch of his-
tory when the ' National Petition ' carts itseli: in waggons along
the streets, and is presented 'bound with iron hoops, four
men bearing it,' to a Reformed House of Commons ; and
Chartism numbered by the million and half, taking nothing
by its iron-hooped Petition, breaks out into brickbats, cheap
pikes, and even into sputterings of conflagration, such very
general feeling cannot be considered unnatural ! To us individ-
ually this matter appears, and has for many years appeared,
to be the most ominous of all practical matters whatever ;
matter in regard to which if somethingbe not done, something
will do itself one day, and in a fashion that vvill please nobody.
The time is verily come for acting in it ; how much more for
consultation about acting in it, for speech and articulate in-
quiry about it !

We are aware that, according to the newspapers. Chartism
is extinct ; that a Reformed IVIinistry has ' put down tlio
chimera of Chartism ' in the most felicitous effectual manner.
So say the newspapers ; — and yet, alas, most readers of news-
papers know withal that it is indeed the ' chimera ' of Chartism,
not the realit}', which has been put down. The distracted in-
coherent embodiment of Chartism, whereby in late months it
* First published in January, 1840.

6 CHARTISM.

took shape and became visible, this has been put down ; or
rather has fallen down and gone asunder by gravitation and law
of nature ; but the living essence of Chartism has not been put
down. Chartism means the bitter discontent grown fierce and
mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition, of
the Working Classes of England. It is a new name for a thing
which has had many names, and which will yet have many. The
matter of Chartism is weighty, deep-rooted, far extending ; did
not begin yesterday ; will by no means end this day or to-mor-
row. Reform Ministry, constabulary rural police, new levy of
soldiers, grants of money to Birmingham ; all this is well, or
is not well ; all this will put down onl}^ the embodiment or
' chimera ' of Chartism. The essence continuing, new and
ever new embodiments, chimeras madder or less mad, have to
continue. The melancholy fact remains, that this thing known •
at present by the name Chartism does exist, has existed ; and,
either 'put down,' into secret treason, with rusty pistols, vit-
riol-bottle and match-box,, or openly brandishing pike and
torch (one knows not in which case more fatal-looking), is like
to exist till quite other methods have been tried with it.
What means this bitter discontent of the Working Classes?
Whence comes it, whither goes it ? Above all, at what price,
on what terms, will it probably consent to depart from us and
die into rest ? These are questions.

To say that it is mad, incendiary, nefarious, is no answer.
To say all this, in never so many dialects, is sajdng little.
* Glasgow Thuggery,' 'Glasgow Thugs;' it is a witty nick-
name : the practice of ' Number 60 ' entering his dark room,
to contract for and settle the price of blood with operative '
assassins, in a Christian city, once distinguished by its rigorous
Christianism, is doubtless a fact worthy of all horror : but
what will horror do for it ? What will execration ; nay at
bottom what will condemnation and banishment to Botany
Bay do for it ? Glasgow Thuggery, Chartist torch-meetings,
Birmingham riots, Swing conflagrations, are so many sj^mp-
toms on the surface ; you abolish the symptom to no purpose,
if the disease is left untouched. Boils on the surface are cur-
able or incurable, — small matter which, while the virulent

CONDITION OV-ENOL AND QUESTION. <

humour festers deep within ; poisoning the source of life ;
and certain enough to find for itself ever new boils and sore
issues ; ways of announcing that it continues there, that it
would fain not continue there.

Delirious Chartism will not have raged entirely to no pirr-
pose, as indeed no earthly thing does so, if it have forced all
thinking men of the community to think of this vital matter, too
apt to be overlooked otherwise. Is the condition of the Eng-
lish working people wrong ; so wrong that rational working
men cannot, will not, and even should not rest quiet under it ?
A most grave case, complex beyond all others in the world ;
a case wherein Botany Bay, constabulary rural police, and
such like, will avail but little. Or is the discontent itself mad,
like the shape it took ? Not the condition of the working peo-
ple that is wrong ; but their disposition, their own thoughts,
beliefs and feelings that are wrong? This too were a most
grave case, little less alarming, little less complex, than the
former one. Li tliis case too, where constabulaiy police and
mere rigour of coercion seems more at home, coercion will by
no means do all, coercion by itself will not even do much. If
there do exist general madness of discontent, then sanity and
some measure of content must be brought about again, — not
by constabulary police alone. When the thoughts of a people,
in the great mass of it, have grown mad, the combined issue
of that people's workings will be a madness, an incoherency
and ruin ! Sanity will have to be recovered for the general
mass ; coercion itself will otherwise cease to be able to coerce.

We have heard it asked, Why Parliament throws no light
on this question of the Working Classes, and the condition or
disposition they are in ? Truly to a remote observer of Par-
liamentary procedure it seems sui'prising, especially in late
Reformed times, to see what space this question occupies in
the Debates of the Nation. Can any other business whatso-
ever be so pressing on legislators ? A Reformed Parhament,
one would think, should inquire into popular discontents he-
fore they get the length of pikes and torches ! For what end
at all are men, Honoui^able Members and Reform Members,
sent to St. Stephen's, with clamour and effort ; kept talking.

8 CHARTISM.

struggling, motioning and counter-motioning ? Tlie condition
of the great body of people in a country is the condition of
the country itself : this you would say is a truism in all times ;
a truism rather pressing to get recognised as a truth now,
and be acted upon, in these times. Yet read Hansard's De-
bates, or the Morning Papers, if you have nothing to do !
The old grand question, whether A is to be in office or B,
with the innumerable subsidiary questions gi-owing out of
that, courting paragraphs and suffrages for a blessed solution
of that : Canada question, Irish Appropriation question. West
Lidia question. Queen s Bedchamber question ; Game Laws,
"Usury Laws ; African Blacks, Hill Coolies, Smithfield cattle,
and Dog-carts, — all manner of questions and subjects, except
simply this the alpha and omega of all ! Surely Honourable
Members ought to speak of the Condition-of-England ques-
tion too. Eadical Members, above all ; fri^ends of the people ;
chosen with effort, by the people, to intrepret and articulate
the dumb deep want of the people ! To a remote observer
they seem oblivious of their duty. Are they not there, by
trade, mission, and express appointment of themselves and
others, to speak for the good of the British Nation ? What-
soever great British interest can the least speak for itself, for
that beyond all they are called to speak. They are either
speakers for that great dumb toiling class which cannot speak,
or they are nothing that one can well specify.

Alas, the remote observer knows not the nature of Parlia-
ments : how Parliaments, extant there for the British Nation's
sake, find that they are extant withal for their own sake ; how
Parliaments travel so naturally, in their deep-rutted routine,
common-place worn into ruts axle-deep, fi'om which only
strength, insight and courageous generous exertion can lift
any Parliament or vehicle ; how in Parhaments, Keformed or
Unreformed, there may chance to be a strong man, an origi-
nal, clear-sighted, great hearted, patient and valiant man, or
there may chance be to none such ; — how, on the whole. Parlia-
ments, lumbering along in their deep ruts of common-place,
find, as so many of us otherwise do, that the ruts are axle-
deep, and the travelling very toilsome of itself, and for the

CONBITION-OF-ENGLAND QUESTION. 9

day the evil thereof sufficient ! "What Parliaments ought to
have done in this business, what they will, can or cannot yet
do, and where the limits of their faculty and culpability may
lie, in regard to it, were a long investigation ; into which wa
need not enter at this moment. What they have done is unhap-
pily plain enough. Hitherto, on this most national of ques-
tions, the Collective Wisdom of the Nation has availed us as
good as nothing whatever.

And yet, as we say, it is a question which cannot be left to
the Collective Folly of the Nation ! In or out of Parliament,
darkness, neglect, hallucination must contrive to cease in re-
gard to it ; true insight into it must be had. How inexpress-
ibly useful were true insight into it ; a genuine understanding
by the upper classes of society what it is that the under classes
intrinsically mean ; a clear intei-pretation of the thought which
at heart torments these wild inarticulate souls, struggling
there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb creatures in pain,
unable to speak what is in them ! Something they do mean ;
some true thing withal, in the centre of their confused hearts,
— for they are hearts created by Heaven too : to the Heaven
it is clear what thing ; to us not clear. Would that it were !
Perfect clearness on it were equivalent to remedy of it. For,
as is well said, all battle is misunderstanding ; did the parties
know one another, the battle would cease. No man at bot-
tom means injustice ; it is always for some obscure distorted
image of aright that he contends : an obscure image diffi'acted,
exaggerated, in the wonderfullest way, by natural dimness and
selfishness ; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation
of contest, till at length it become all but iiTecognisable ; yet
still the imao'e of a ricfht. Could a man own to himself that
the thing he fought for was wrong, contrary to fairness and
the law of reason, he would own also that it thereby stood con-
demned and hopeless ; he could fight for it no longer. Nay
independently of right, could the contending parties get but
accurately to discern one another's might and strength to con-
tend, the one would peaceably yield to the other and to Ne-
cessity ; the contest in this case too were over. No African
expedition now, as in the days of Herodotus, is fitted- out

10 CHARTISM.

against the South-wind. One expedition was satisfactoiy in
that department. The South-wind Simoom continues blow-
ing occasionally, hateful as ever, maddening as ever ; but one
expedition was enough. Do we not all submit to Death ?
The highest sentence of the law, sentence of death, is passed
on all of us by the fact of birth ; yet we live patiently under
it, patiently undergoing it when the hour comes. Clear un-
deniable right, clear undeniable might : either of these once
ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused ex-
periment to ascertain one and both of these.

What are the rights, what are the mights of the discon-
tented Working Classes in England at this epoch ? He were
an QEdipus, and deliverer from sad social pestilence, who
could resolve us fully ! For we may say beforehand, The
struggle that divides the upper and lower in society over Eu-
rope, and more painfully and notably in England than else-
where, this too is a struggle which will end and adjust itself
as all other struggles do and have done, by making the right
clear and the might clear ; not otherwise than by that. Mean-
time, the questions. Why are the Working Classes discon-
tented ; what is their condition, economical, moral, in theh'
houses and their hearts, as it is in reality and as they figure
it to themselves to be ; what do they complain of ; what ought
they, and ought they not to complain of? — these are measur-
able questions ; on some of these any common mortal, did he
but turn his eyes to them, might throw some light. Certain
researches and considerations of ours on the matter, since no
one else will undertake it, are now to be made public. The
researches have yielded us httle, almost nothing ; but the con-
siderations are of old date, and press to have utterance. We
are not without hope that our general notion of the business,
if we can get it uttered at all, will meet some assent from
many candid men.

STATISTICS. 11

CHAPTEK XL

STATISTICS.

A witty statesman said you might prove anything by figTires.
"We have looked into various statistic works, Statistic-Society
Reports, Poor-Law Reports, Reports and Pamphlets not a few,
with a sedulous eye to this question of the AVorking Classes
and their general condition in England ; we grieve to say,
with as good as no result whatever. Assertion swallows asser-
tion ; according to the old Proverb, ' as the statist thinks, the
bell clinks ! ' Tables are like cobwebs, like the sieve of the
Danaides ; beautifully reticulated, orderly to look upon, but
which will hold no conclusion. Tables are abstractions, and
the object a most concrete one, so difficult to read the essence
of. There are innumerable circumstances ; and one circum-
stance left out may be the vital one on which all turned.
Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, the basis
of many most important sciences ; but it is not to be carried
on by steam, this science, any more than others are ; a wise
head is requisite for carrying it on. Conclusive facts are in-
separable from inconclusive except by a head that ah-eady
understands and knows. Vain to send the purblind and blind
to the shore of a Pactolus never so golden : these find only
gravel ; the seer and finder alone picks up gold grains there.
And now the purblind offering you, with asseveration and
protrusive importunity, his basket of gravel as gold, what steps
are to be taken with him ? — Statistics, one may hope, will im-
prove gradually, and become good for something. Meanwhile
it is to be feared, the crabbed satirist was partly right, as
things go : 'A judicious man,' says he, ' looks at Statistics,
' not to get knowledge, but to save himself from having igno-
' ranee foisted on him.' With what serene conclusiveness a
member of some Useful-Knowledge Society stops your mouth
with a figure of arithmetic ! To him it seems he has there ex-
tracted the elixir of the matter, on which now nothing more
can be said. It is needful that jO\x look into his said extracted

12 CHARTISM.

elixir ; and ascertain, alas, too probably, not without a sigli,
that it is wash and vapidity, good only for the gutters.

Twice or three times have we heard the lamentations and
prophecies of a humane Jeremiah, mourner for the poor, cut
short by a statistic fact of the most decisive nature : How can
the condition of the poor be other than good, be other than
better ; has not the average dui'ation of life in England, and
therefore among the most numerous class in England, been
proved to have increased ? Our Jeremiah had to admit that,
if so, it was an astounding fact ; whereby all that ever he, for
his part, had observed on other sides of the matter was overset
without remedy. If life last longer, life must be less worn
upon, by outward suffering, by inward discontent, by hardship
of any kind ; the general condition of the poor must be bet-
tering instead of worsening. So was our Jeremiah cut short.
And now for the ' proof ? ' Readers who are curious in statistic
proofs may see it drawn out with all solemnity, in a Pamphlet
' published by Charles Knight and Company,'* — and perhaps
himself draw inferences from it ; Northampton Tables, com-
piled by Dr. Price ' from registers of the Parish of All Saints
from 1735 to 1780 ; ' Carhsle Tables, collected by Dr. Hey-
sham from observation of Carlisle City for eight years, ' the
calculations founded on them ' conducted by another Doctor ;
incredible ' document considered satisfactory by men of sci-
ence in France : ' — alas, is it not as if some zealous scientific
son of Adam had proved the deepening of the Ocean, by sur-
vey, accurate or cursory, of two mud-plashes on the coast of
the Isle of Dogs ? ' Not to get knowledge, but to save your-
self from having ignorance foisted on you ! '

The condition of the working man in this country, what it
is and has been, whether it is improving or retrograding, — is
a question to which from statistics hitherto no solution can be
got. Hitherto, after many tables and statements, one is still
left mainly to what he can ascertain by his own eyes, looking
at the concrete phenomenon for himself. There is no other
method ; and yet it is a most imperfect method. Each man

* An Essay on the Means of Insurance against the Casualties of &c.,
he. London, Charles Knight and Company, 1830. Price two shillings.

STATISTICS. 13

expands his own hand-breadth of observation to the limits of
the general whole ; more or less, each man must take what he
himself has seen and ascertained for a sample of all that is
seeable and ascertainable. Hence discrepancies, controversies
wide-spread, long-continued ; which there is at present no
means or hope of satisfactorily ending. When Parliament
takes up the ' Condition-of-Engiand question,' as it will have
to do one day, then indeed much may be amended! Inquii'ies
wisely gone into, even on this most complex matter, will yield
results worth something, not nothing. But it is a most com-
plex matter ; on which, whether for the past or the present.
Statistic Inquiry, with its limited means, with its short vision
and headlong extensive dogmatism, as yet too often throws
not light, but error worse than darkness.

What constitutes the well-being of a man ? Many things ;
of w^hich the wages he gets, and the bread he buys with them,
are but one preliminary item. Grant, however, that the
wages were the whole ; that once knowing the wages and the
price of bread, we know all ; then what are the wages ?
Statistic Inquiry, in its present unguided condition, cannot
tell. The average rate of day's wages is not correctly as-
certained for any portion of this country ; not only not for
half-centuries, it is not even ascertained anywhere for decades
or years : far from instituting comparisons with the past, the
present itself is unknown to us. And then, given the average
of wages, what is the constancy of emploj^ment ; what is the
difficulty of finding employment ; the fluctuation from season
to season, from year to year? Is it constant, calculable
wages ; or fluctuating, incalculable, more or less of the nature
of gambling? This secondary circumstance, of quality in
wages, is perhaps even more important than the primary one
of quantity. Farther we ask, Can the labourer, by thrift and
industry, hope to rise to mastership ; or is such hope cut olf
from him ? How is he related to his employer ; by bonds of
friendliness and mutual help ; or by hostility, opposition, and
chains of mutual necessity alone? In a word, what degree of
contentment can a human creature be supposed to enjoy in
that position? With hunger preying on him^ his content-

14 CHARTISM.

ment is likely to be small ! But even with abundance, his
discontent, his real misery may be great. The labourer's
feelings, his notion of being justly dealt with or unjustly ; his
wholesome composure, frugality, prosperity in the one case,
his acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and gradual ruin
in the other, — how shall figures of arithmetic represent all
this ? So much is still to be ascertained ; much of it by no
means easy to ascertain ! Till, among the ' Hill Cooly ' and
' Dog-cart ' questions, there arise in Parliament and extensively
out of it a 'Condition-of -England question,' and quite a new set
of inquirers and methods, little of it is likely to be ascertained.
One fact on this subject, a fact which arithmetic is capable
of representing, we have often considered would be worth^all
the rest : whether the labourer, whatever his wages are, is
saving money ? Laying up money, he proves that his condi-
tion, painful as it may be without and within, is not yet
desperate ; that he looks forward to a better day coming, and
is still resolutely steering toward the same ; that all the lights
and darkness of his lot are united under a blessed radiance
of hope, — the last, first, nay one may say the sole blessedness
of man. Is the habit of saving increased and increasing, or
the contrary ? Where the present writer has been able to
look with his own eyes, it is decreasing, and in many quarters
all but disappearing. Statistic science turns up her Savings-
Bank Accounts, and answers, "Increasing rapidly." Would
that one could believe it ! But the Danaides'-sieve character
of such statistic reticulated documents is too manifest. A
few years ago, in regions where thrift, to one's own knowledge,
still was, Savings-Banks were not ; the labourer lent his
money to some farmer, of capital, or supposed to be of capital,
— and has too often lost it since ; or he bought a cow with it,
bought a cottage with it ; nay hid it under his thatch : the
Savings-Banks books then exhibited mere blank and zero.
That they swell yearly now, if such be the fact, indicates that
what thrift exists does gradually resort more and more thither
rather than elsewither ; but the question, Is thrift increasing?
runs through the reticulation, and is as water spilt on the
ground, not to be gathered here.

NEW POOR-LAW. 15

These are inquiries on which, had there been a proper
' Con dition-of -England question,' some Hght would have been
thrown before ' torch-meetings ' arose to illustrate them !
For as they lie out of the course of Parliamentary routine,
they should have been gone into, should have been glanced
at, in one or the other fashion. A Legislature making laws
for the Working Classes, in total uncertainty as to these things,
is legislating in the dark ; not wisely, nor to good issues.
The simple fundamental question. Can the labouring man
in this England' of ours, who is willing to labour, find work,
and subsistence by his work? is matter of mere conjecture
and assertion hitherto ; not ascertainable by authentic evi-
dence : the Legislature, satisfied to legislate in the dark, has
not yet sought any evidence on it. They pass their New
Poor-Law Bill, without evidence as to all this. Perhaps their
New Poor-Law Bill is itself only intended as an e.rjjerimentum
crucis to ascertain all this ? Chartism is an answer, seem-
ingly not in the affirmative.

CHAPTER III.

NEW POOK-LAW.

To read the Eeports of the Poor-Law Commissioners, if one
had faith enough, would be a pleasure to the friend of hu-
manity. One sole recipe seems to have been needful for the
woes of England: 'refusal of out-door relief.' England lay
in sick discontent, writhing powerless on its fever-bed, dark,
nigh desperate, in wastefulness, want, improvidence, and eat-
ing care, till like Hyperion down the eastern steeps, the Poor-
Law Commissioners arose, and said. Let there be workhouses,
and bread of affliction and water of affliction there ! It was a
simple invention ; as all truly great inventions are. And see,
in any quarter, instantly as the walls of the workhouse arise,
misery and necessity fly away, out of sight, — out of being, as
is fondly hoped, and dissolve into the inane ; industry, fru-
gality, fertility, rise of wages, peace on' earth and goodwill
towards men do, — in the Poor-Law Commissioners' Reports,

16 CHARTISM.

— infallibly, rapidly or not so rapidly, to tlie joy of all parties,
supervene. It was a consummation devoutly to be wislied.
We have looked over these four annual Poor-Law Reports
"with a variety of reflections ; with no thought that our Poor-
Law Commissioners are the inhuman men their enemies
accuse them of being ; with a feeling of thankfulness rather
that there do exist men of that structure too ; with a persua-
sion deeper and deeper that Nature, who makes nothing to no
purj)ose, has not made either them or their Poor-Law Amend-
ment Act in vain. We hope to prove that they and it were
an indispensable element, harsh but salutary, in the progress
of things.

That this Poor-Law Amendment Act meanwhile should be,
as we sometimes hear it named, the ' chief glory ' of a Reform
Cabinet, betokens, one would imagine, rather a scarcity of
glory there. To say to the poor, Ye shall eat the bread of
affliction and drink the water of affliction and be very miser-
able while here, required not so much a stretch of heroic
faculty in any sense, as due toughness of bowels. If paupers
are made miserable, paupers will needs decline in multitude.
It is a secret known to all rat-catchers : stop up the granar^'--
crevices, afflict with continual mewing, alarm, and going-off
of traps, your ' chargeable labourers ' disappear, and cease
from the establishment. A still briefer method is that of ar-
senic : perhaps even a milder, wiiere otherwise permissible.
Rats and paupers can be abolished ; the human faculty was
from of . old adequate to grind them down, slowly or at once,
and needed no ghost or Reform Ministry to teach it. Fur-
thermore when one hears of ' all the labour of the country
being absorbed into employment ' by this new system of
affliction, when labour complaining of want can find no audi-
ence, one cannot but pause. That misery and unemployed
labour should ' disappear ' in that case is natural enougli ;
should go out of sight— but out of existence ? What we do
know is that ' the rates are diminished,' as they Cc'tnnot Avell
help' being ; that no statistic tables as yet report much in-
crease of deaths by starvation : this we do know, and not
very conclusively anything more than this. If tliis be absorp-

NEW POOR-LAW. 17

tiou of all the labour of the country, then all the labour of
the country is absorbed.

To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here
only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated, and in some
permissible manner made away with, and swept out of sight,
is not an amiable faith. That the arrangements of good and
ill success in this perplexed scramble of a world, which a
bhnd goddess was always thought to preside over, are in fact
the work of a seeing goddess or god, and require only not to
be meddled with : what stretch of heroic faculty or inspira-
tion of genius was needed to teach one 4hat ? To button
your pockets and stand still, is no complex recipe. Laissez
faille, laissez passer^ ! AVhatever goes on, ought it not to go
on ; * the widow picking nettles for her children's dinner, and
'the perfumed seigneur delicately lounging in the (Eil-de-

* Boeuf, who has an alchemy whereby he will extract from

* her the third nettle, and name it rent and law ? ' What is
written and enacted, has it not black-on-white to shew for it-
self? Justice is justice; but all attorney's parchment is of
the nature of Targum or sacred-parchment. In brief, ours is
a world requiring only to be well let alone. Scramble along,
thou insane scramble of a world, with thy pope's tiaras, king's
mantles and beggar's gabardines, chivalry-ribbons and ple-
beian gallows-ropes, where a Paul shall die on the gibbet and
a Nero sit fiddling as imperial Ctesar ; thou art all right, and
shalt scramble even so ; and whoever in the press is trodden
down, has only to lie there and be trampled broad : — Such at
bottom seems to be the chief social principle, if principle it
have, which the Poor-Law Amendment Act has the merit of
courageously asserting, in opposition to many things. A
chief social principle which this present writer, for one, will
by no manner of means believe in, but pronounce at all fit
times to be false, heretical and damnable, if ever aught was !

And yet, as we said, Nature makes nothing in vain ; not
even a Poor-Law Amendment Act. For withal we are far
from joining in the outcry raised against these Poor-Law
Commissioners, as if they were tigers in men's shape ; as if
their Amendment Act w^ere a mere monstrosity and horror,
2

18 CHABTISM.

deserving instant abrogation. They are not tigers ; they are
men filled with an idea of a theory ; their Amendment Act,
heretical and damnable as a whole truth, is orthodox laudable
as a h((lf truth ; and was imperatively required to be put in
practice. To create men filled with a theory that refusal of
out-door relief was the one thing needful : Nature had no
readier way of getting out-door relief refused. In fact, if we
look at the old Poor Law, in its assertion of the ojDposite
social principle, that Fortune's aw^ards are not those of Justice,
we shall find it to have become still more un supportable, de-
manding, if Eugifwid was not destined for speedy anarch}^, to
be done away with.

Any law, however well meant as a law, which has become
a bounty on unthrift, idleness, bastardy and beer-drinking,
must be put an end to. In aU ways it needs, especially in
these times, to be proclaimed aloud that for the idle man there
is no place in this England of ours. He that will not work,
and save according to his means, let him go elsewhither ; let
him know that for him the Law has made no soft provision,
but a hard and stern one ; that by the Law of Nature, which
the Law of England would vainly contend against in the long-
run, he is doomed either to quit these habits, or miserably be
extruded from this Earth, which is made on principles dif-
ferent from these. He that will not work according to his
faculty, let him perish according to his necessity : there is no
law juster than that. Would to heaven one could preach it
abroad into the hearts of all sons and daughters of Adam, for
it is a law applicable to all ; and bring it to bear, with prac-
tical obligation strict as the Poor-Law Bastille, on all. We
had then, in good truth, a ' perfect constitution of society ; '
and ' God's fair Earth and Task-garden, where whosoever is
not working must be begging or stealing,' were then actually
what always, through so many changes and struggles, it is en-
deavoring to become.

That this law of No work no recompense, should first of all
be enforced on the manual worker, and brought stringently
home to him and his numerous class, while so many other
classes and persons still go loose from it, was natui-al to the

NEW POOR-LAW. ID

case. Let it be enforced there, and rigidly made good. It
behoves to be enforced everywhere, and rigidly made good ; —
alas, not by such simple methods as ' refusal of outdoor re-
lief,' but by far other and costlier ones ; which too, however,
a bountiful Providence is not unfiu^nished with, nor, in these
latter generations (if we will understand their convulsions and
confusions), sparing to apply. Work is the mission of man
in this Earth. ^ day is ever struggling forward, a day will
arrive in some approximate degree, when he who has no work
to do, by whatever name he may be named, wall not find it
good to show himself in our quarter of the Solar System ; but
may go and look out elsew^here. If there be any Idle Planet
discoverable ? — Let the honest w^orking man rejoice that such
law, the first of Nature, has been mad^ good on him ; and
hope that, by and by, all else will be made good. It is the
bemnninof of all. We define the harsh New Poor-Law to be
wdthal a ' protection of the thrifty labourer against the thrift-
less and dissolute ; ' a thing inexpressibly important ; a half-
result, detestable, if you will, when looked upon as the whole
result ; yet without which the whole result is forever unat-
tainable. Let wastefulness, idleness, drunkenness, imj^rovi-
dence take the fate w^hich God has appointed them ; that
their opposites may also have a chance for their fate. Let the
Poor-Law Administrators be considered as useful labourers
whom Nature has furnished with a whole theory of the uni-
verse, that they might accomphsh an indispensable fractional
practice there, and prosper in it in spite of much contradic-
tion.

"We will praise the New Poor-Law, farther, as the probable
preliminary of some general charge to be taken of the lowest
classes by the higher. Any general charge w^hatsoever, rather
than a conflict of charges, varying from parish to parish ; the
emblem of darkness, of unreadable confusion. Supervisal by
the central government, in what spirit soever executed, is
supervisal from a centre. By degrees the object will bec6me
clearer, as it is at once made thereby universally conspicuous.
By degTees true vision of it wdll become attainable, will be
universally attained ; w^hatsoever order regai'ding it is just

20 CHARTISM.

and wise, as grounded on the truth of it, will then be capable
of being taken. Let us welcome the New Poor-Law as the
harsh beginning of much, the harsh ending of much ! Most
harsh and barren lies the new ploughers' fallow-field, the
crude subsoil all turned up, which never saw the sun ; which
as yet grows no herb ; which has 'out-door relief for no one.
Yet patience : innumerable weeds and corruptions lie safely
turned down and extinguished under it ; this same crude
subsoil is the first step of all true husbandry ; by Heaven's
blessing and the skyey influences, fruits that are good and
blessed will yet come of it.

For, in truth, the claim of the poor labourer is something
quite other than that ' Statute of the Forty-third of Eliza-
beth ' will ever fulfil for him. Not to be supported by rounds-
men systems, by never so liberal parish doles, or lodged in
free and easy workhouses when distress overtakes him ; not
for this, however in words he may clamour for it ; not for
this, but for something far different does the heart of him
struggle. It is 'for justice' that he struggles; for 'just
wages,' — not in money alone ! An ever-toiling inferior, he
would fain (though as yet he knows it not) find for himself a
superior that should lovingly and wisely govern : is not that
too the ' just wages ' of his service done ? It is for a manlike
place and relation, in this world where he sees himself a man,
that he struggles. At bottom may we not say it is even for
this, That guidance and government, which he cannot give
himself, which in our so complex world he can no longer do
without, might be afforded him ? The thing he struggles for
is one which no Forty-third of Elizabeth is in any condition
to furnish him, to put him on the road towards getting. Let
liim quit the Forty-third of Elizabeth altogether ; and rejoice
that the Poor-Law Amendment Act has, even by harsh meth-
ods and against his own will, forced him away from it. That
was a broken reed to lean on, if there ever was one ; and did
but run into his lamed right-hand. Let him cast it far from
him, that broken reed, and look to quite the opposite point
of the heavens for help. His unlamed right-hand, with the
cunning industry that lies in it, is not this defined to be ' the

FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 21

sceptre of our Planet ' ? He that can work is a born king of
something ; is in communion with Nature, is master of a thing
or things, is a priest and king of Nature so far. He that can
work at nothing is but a usurping king, be his trappings what
they may ; he is the born slave of all things. Let a man
honour his craftsmanship, his can-do ; and know that his
rights of man have no concern at all with the Forty-third of
Ehzabeth.

CHAPTER IV.

FINEST PEASANTRY IX THE WOKLD.

The New Poor-Law is an announcement, sufficiently dis-
tinct, that whosoever will not work ought not to live. Can
the poor man that is willing to work, alwaj^s find w-ork, and
live by his work ? Statistic Inquiry, as we saw, has no an-
swer to give. Legislation presupposes the answer — to be in
the affirmative. A large postulate ; w^hich should have been
made a proposition of ; w^hich should have been demonstrated,
made indubitable to all persons ! A man willing to work, and
unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that Fort-
une's inequality exhibits iinder this sun. Burns exprefc>ses
feelingly what thoughts it gave him ; a poor man seeking
ivork ; seeking leave to toil that he might be fed and shel-
tered ! That he might be put on a level with the four-footed
workers of the Planet which is his ! There is not a horse
willing to work but can get food and shelter in requital ; a
thing this two-footed worker has to seek for, to solicit occa-
sionally in vain. He is nobody's two-footed w^orker ; he is not
even anybody's slave. And yet he is a ^loo-footed worker ;
it is currently reported there is an immortal soul in him, sent
doAvn out of Heaven into the Earth ; and one beholds him
seeking for this ! — Nay what will a wise Legislature sa}', if it
turn out that he cannot find it ; that the answer to then* pos-
tulate proposition is not affirmative but negative ?

There is one fact which Statistic Science has communicated,
and a most astonishing one ; the inference from which is preg-
nant as to this matter. Ii-eland has near seven milhons of

22 CHARTISM.

working people, the third unit of whom, it appears by Statis-
tic Science, has not for thirty weeks each year as many third-
rate potatoes as will suffice him. It is a fact perhaps the most
eloquent that was ever written down in any language, at any
date of the world's histor}^ Was change and reformation
needed in Ii^eland ? Has Ireland been governed and guided
in a ' wise and loving ' manner ? A government and guidance
of white European men which has issued in perennial hun-
ger of potatoes to the third man extant, — ought to drop a
veil over its face, and walk out of court under conduct of
proper officers ; saying no word ; expecting now of a surety
sentence either to change or die. All men, we must repeat,
were made by God, and have immortal souls in them. The
Sanspotatoe is of the selfsame stuff as the superfinest Lord
Lieutenant. Not an individual Sanspotatoe human scarecrow
but had a Life given him out of Heaven, with Eternities de-
pending on it ; for once and no second time. With Immensi-
ties in him, over him and round him ; with feelings which a
Shakspeare's speech would not utter ; with desires illimitable
as the Autocrat's of all the Russias ! Him various thrice-
honoured persons, things and institutions have long been
teaching, long been guiding, governing : and it is to perpetual
scarcity of third-rate potatoes, and to what depends thereon,
that he has been taught and guided. Figure thyself, O high-
minded, clear-headed, clean-burnished reader, clapt by en-
chantment into the torn coat and waste hunger-lau* of that
same root-devouring brother man ! —

Social anomalies are things to be defended, things to be
amended ; and in all places and things, short of the Pit itself,
there is some admixture of worth and good. Room for ex-
tenuation, for pity, for patience ! And yet when the general
result has come to the length of j)erennial starvation, — yes,
then argument, extenuating logic, pity and patience on that
subject may be considered as drawing to a close. It may be
considered that such arrangement of things will have to termi-
nate. That it has all just men for its natural enemies. That
all just men, of what outward colour soever in Politics or
otherwise, will say : This cannot last, Heaven disowns it,

FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 23

Earth is against it ; Ireland will be burnt into a black unpeo-
pled field of ashes rather than this should last. — The woes of
Ireland, or 'justice to Ireland,' is not the chapter we have to
write at present. It is a deep matter, an abysmal one, which
no plummet of ours will sound. For the oppression has gone
far farther than into the economies of Ireland ; inwards to her
very heart and soul. The Irish National character is degraded,
disordered ; till this recover itseK, nothing is yet recovered.
Immethodic, headlong, violent, mendacious ; what can you
make of the wretched Irishman? "A finer people never
lived," as the Irish lady said to us ; " only they have two faults,
they do generally lie and steal : barring these " — ! A people
that knows not to speak the truth, and to act the truth, such
people has departed from even the possibiHty of well-being.
Such people works no longer on Nature and Reality ; works
now on Fantasm, Simulation, Nonentity ; the result it arrives
at is naturally not a thing but no-thing, — defect even of po-
tatoes. Scarcity, futility, confusion, distraction must be peren-
nial there. Such a people circulates not order but disorder,
through every vein of it ; — and the cure, if it is to be a cure,
must begin at the heart : not in his condition only but in him-
self must the Patient be all changed. Poor Ireland ! .And yet
let no true Irishman, who believes and sees all this, despair*
by reason of it. Cannot he too do something to withstand
the unproductive falsehood, there as it lies accursed around
him, and change it into truth, which is fruitful and blessed ?
Every mortal can and shall himself be a true man : it is a gTeat
thing, and the parent of great things y — as fi'om a single acorn
the whole earth might in the end be peopled with oaks !
Every mortal can do something : this let him faithfully do,
and leave with assured heart the issue to a Higher Power !

We EngHsh pay, even now, the bitter smart of long centu-
ries of injustice to our neighbour Island. Injustice, doubt it
not, abounds ; or Ireland would not be miserable. The Earth
is good, bountifully sends food and increase ; if man's unwis-
dom did not intervene and forbid. It was an evil day when
Strigul first meddled with that people. He could not extu'-
pate them : could they but have agreed together, and extii--

24 CHARTISM.

patecl him ! Violent men there have been, and merciful ; un-
just rulers, and just ; conflicting in a great element of violence,
these five wild centuries now ; and the violent and unjust have
carried it, and we are come to this. England is guilty towards
Ireland ; and reaps at last, in full measure, the fruit of fifteen
generations of wrong-doing.

But the thing we had to state here was our inference from
that mournful fact of the thii"d Sanspotatoe, — coupled with
this other well-known fact that the Iiish speak a partially in-
telligible dialect of EngHsh, and their fare across by steam is
foui'-pence sterling ! Crowds of miserable Irish darken all
our towns. The wild IVIilesian featui'es, looking false inge-
nuity, restlessness, unreason, misery and mockeiy, salute you
on all highways and by-ways. The English coachman, as he
whMs past, lashes the INIilesian with his whip, curses him with
his tongue ; the IMilesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is
the sprest evil this countiy has to strive with. In his rags and
laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can
be done by mere strength of hand and back ; for wages that
will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condi-
ment ; he lodges to his mind in any pighutch or doghutch,
roosts in outhouses ; and wears a suit of tatters, the getting
oif and on of which is said to be a difficult operation, trans-
acted only in festivals and the hightides of the calendar. The
Saxon man if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work.
He too may be ignorant ; but he has not sunk from decent
manhood to squalid apehood : he cannot continue there.
American forests lie untilled across the ocean ; the uncivilised
Irishman, not by his strength but by the opposite of strength,
drives out the Saxon native, takes possession in his room.
There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity
and diiinken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degi'a-
dation and disorder. Whosoever struggles, swimming with
difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can
exist not swimming but sunk. Let him sink ; he is not the
worst of men ; not worse than this man. We have quarentines
against pestilence ; but there is no pestilence like that ; and
against it what quarentine is possible ? It is lamentable to look

FINEST PEASANTRY IX THE WORLD. 25

upon. This soil of Britain, these Saxon men have cleared it,
made it arable, fertile and a home for them ; they and their
fathers have done that. Under the sky there exists no force of
men who with arms in their hands could drive them out of it ; all
force of men with arms these Saxons would seize, in their grim
way, and fling (Heaven's justice and their own Saxon humour
aiding them) swiftly into the sea. But behold, a force of men
armed onlv with ra^'s, iofnorance and nakedness ; and the
Saxon owners, paralysed by invisible magic of paper formula,
have to fly far, and hide themselves in Transatlantic forests.
'Irish repeal?' ''AYould to God," as Dutch William said,
" You were King of Ireland, and could take 3'ourself and it
three thousand miles off," — there to repeal it !

And 3'et these poor Celtiberian Irish brothers, what cau they
help it ? They cannot stay at home, and starve. It is just
and natural that they come hither as a curse to us. Alas, for
them too it is not a luxury. It is not a straight or joyful way
of avenging their sore wrongs this ; but a most sad circuitous
one. Yet a way it is, and an effectual way. The time has
come when the Irish poj^ulation must either be improved a
Httle, or else exterminated. Plausible management, adapted
to this hollow outcry or to that, will no longer do : it must be
management, grounded on sincerity and fact, to which the
truth of things wall respond — by an actual beginning of im-
provement to these wretched brother-men. In a state of per-
ennial ultra-savage famine, in the midst of civilisation, they
cannot continue. For that the Saxon British will ever submit
to sink along with them to such a state, we assume as impos-
sible. There is in these latter, thank God, an ingenuity which
is not false ; a methodic spirit, of insight, of perseverant well-
doing ; a rationality and veracity which Nature with her truth
does not disown ; — withal there is a ' Berserkir-rage ' in the
heart of them, which will prefer all things, including destruc-
tion and self-destruction, to that. Let no man awaken it, this
same Berserkir-rage ! Deep-hidden it lies, far down in the
centre, like genial central fire, with stratum after stratum
of arrangement, traditionary method, composed productive-
ness, all built above it, vivified and rendered fertile by it :

26 CHARTISM.

justice, clearness, silence, perseverance, unliasting unresting
diligence, hatred of disorder, hatred of injustice wliich.is the
worst disorder, characterise this people ; their inward fire we
say, as all such fire should be, is hidden at the centre. Deep-
hidden ; but awakenable, but immeasurable ; — let no man
awaken it ! With this strong silent people have the noisy
vehement Irish now at length got common cause made. Ire-
land, now for the first time, in such strange circuitous way,
does find itself embarked in the same boat with En Hand, to
sail together or to sink together ; the wretchedness of Ireland,
slowly but inevitably, has crept over to us, and become oui"
own wretchedness. The Irish population must get itself re-
dressed and saved, for the sake of the English if for nothing
else. Alas, that it should, on both sides, be poor toiling men
that pay the smart for unruly Striguls, Plantagenets, Mac-
dermots, and O'Donoghues ! The strong have eaten sour
grapes, and the teeth of the weak are set on edge. ' Curses/
says the Proverb, 'are like chickens, they return always
home.'

But now on the whole, it seems to us, English Statistic Sci-
ence, with floods of the finest peasantry in the world stream-
ing in on us daily, may fold up her Danaides reticulations on
this matter of the Working Classes ; and conclude, wdiat every
man who will take the statistic spectacles off his nose, and
look, may discern in town or country : That the condition of
the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more
and more to that of the Irish competing with them in all
markets ; that wdiatsoever labour, to which mere strength
with little skill will sufiice, is to be done, will be done not at
the EngUsh price, but at an approximation to the Irish price :
at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior to
scarcity of third-rate potatoes for thirty weeks yearly ; su-
perior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat,
sinking nearer to an equality with that. Half-a-million hand-
loom weavers, working fifteen hours a day, in perpetual ina-
bility to procure thereby enough of the coarsest food ; Eng-
lish farm-labourers at nine shillings and at seven shillings a
week ; Scotch farm-laboui'ers who, ' in districts the half of

FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD 27

%.

whose husbandry is that of cows, taste no milk, can pi'ocure «

no milk ; ' all these things are credible to us ; several of them
are known to us by the best evidence, by eyesight. ^Yith all
this it is consistent that the wages of ' skilled labour,' as it is
called, should in many cases be higher than they ever were :
the giant Steam engine in a giant English Nation will here
create violent demand for labour, and will there annihilate
demand. But, alas, the great portion is not skilled : the mil-
lions are and must be skilless, where strength alone is
wanted,; ploughers, delvers, borers ; hewers of wood and
drawers of water ; menials of the Steam engine only the chief
menials and immediate 6orZ//- servants of which require skill.
English Commerce stretches its fibres over the whole Earth ;
sensitive literally, nay quivering in convulsion, to the farthest
influences of the Earth. The huge demon of Mechanism
smokes and thunders, panting at his great task, in all sections
of English land ; changing his shapj like a very Proteus ; and
infallibly at every change of shape, oversetting whole multi-
tudes of workmen, and as if with the waving of his shadow
from afar, hurling them asunder, this way and that, in their
crowded march and course of work or traffic ; so that the
wisest no longer knows his whereabout. AYith an Ireland
pouring daily in on us, in these circumstances ; deluging us
down to its own waste confusion, outward and inward, it
seems a cruel mockery to tell poor drudges that their con-
dition is improving.

New Poor-Law ! Laissez-faire, laisser-passer ! The master
of horses, when the summer labour is done, has to feed his
horses through the winter. If he said to his horses : " Quad-
rupeds, I have no longer work for you ; but work exists
abundantly over the world : are you ignorant (or must I read
you Political-Economy Lectures) that the Steamengine always
in the long-run creates additional work ? Railways are form-
ing in one quarter of this earth, canals in another, much
cartage is wanted : somewhere in Europe, Asia, Africa, or
America, doubt it not, ye will find cartage : go and seek
cartage, and good go with you ! " They with protrusive
upper lip, snort dubious ; signifying that Europe, Asia, Africa,

28 CHARTISM.

,aiid America lie somewhat out of their beat : that what cart-
age may be wanted there is not too well known to them.
They can find no cartage. They gallop distracted along high-
ways, all fenced in to the right and to the left : finally, under
pains of hunger, they take to leaping fences ; eating foreign
property, and — we know the rest. Ah, it is not a joyful
mirth, it is sadder than tears, the laugh Humanity is forced to,
at Laissez-faire applied to poor peasants, in a world like our
Europe of the year 1839 !

So much can observation altogether unstatistic, looking only
at a Drogheda or Dublin steamboat, ascertain for itself.
Another thing, likewise ascertainable on this vast obscure
matter, excites a superficial surprise, but only a superficial one :
That it is the best-paid workmen who, by Strikes, Trades-
unions, Chartism, and the like, complain the most. No doubt
of it ! The best-paid workmen are they alone that can so
complain ! How shall he, the handloom weaver, who in the
day that is passing over him has to find food for the day,
strike work ? If he strike work, he starves within the week.
He is past complaint !' — The fact itself, however, is one which,
if we consider it, leads us into still deeper regions of the
malady. Wages, it would appear, are no index of w^ell-being
to the working man : without proper wages there can be no
well-being ; but with them also there ma}^ be none. Wages
of working men differ greath^ in different quarters of this
country ; according to the researches or the guess of Mr.
Symmons, an intelligent humane inquirer, they vary in the
ratio of not less than three to one. Cotton-si^inners, as we learn,
are generally well paid, while employed ; their wages, one
week with another, wives and children all working, amount to
sums which, if well laid out, were fully adequate to comfort-
able living. And yet, alas, there seems little question that
comfort or reasonable w^ell-being is as much a stranger in
these households as in any. At the cold hearth of the ever-
toiling, ever-hungering weaver, dwells at least some equability,
fixation as if in perennial ice : hope never comes ; but also
irregular impatience is absent. Of outward things these
others have or might have enough, but of all inward things

FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 20

there is the fatallest lack. Economy does not exist among
them ; their trade now in plethoric prosperity, anon extenu-
ated into inanition and ' short-time,' is of the nature of gamb-
ling ; they live by it like gamblers, now in luxurious super-
fluity, now in starvation. Black mutinous discontent devours
them ; simply the miserablest feeling that can inhabit the
heart of man. English Commerce with its world-wide con-
vulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable Proteus Steam-
demon, makes all paths uncertain for them, all life a bewilder-
ment : sobriety, steadfastness, peaceable continuance, the first
blessings of man, are not theirs.

It is in Glasgow among that class of operatives that ' Num-
ber 60,' in his dark room, pays down the price of blood. Be
it with reason or with unreason, too surely they do in verity
find the time all out of joint ; this world for them no home,
but a dingy prison-house of reckless unthrift, rebellion, ran-
cour, indignation against themselves and against all men. Is
it a gTeen flowery world, with azure everlasting sky stretched
over it, the work and government of a God ; or a murky-sim-
mering Tophet, of copperas-fumes, cotton-fuz, gin-riot, wrath
and toil, created by a Demon, governed by a Demon ? The
sum of their wretchedness merited and unmerited welters,
huge, dark and baleful, like a Dantean Hell, visible there in
the statistics of Gin : Gin justly named the most authentic
incarnation of the Infernal Principle in our times, too indis-
putable an incarnation ; Gin the black throat into which
wretchedness of every sort, consummating itself by calHng
on delirium to help it, whirls down ; abdication of the power
to think or resolve, as too painful now, on the part of men
whose lot of all others would require thought and resolution ;
liquid Madness sold at ten-pence the quartern, all the products
of which are and must be, like its origin, mad, miserable,
ruinous, and that only ! If from this black unluminous un-
heeded Inferno, and Prisonhouse of souls in pain, there do
flash up from time to time, some dismal wide-spread glare of
Chartism or the hke, notable to all, claiming remedy from all,
— are we to regard it as more baleful than the quiet state, or
rather as not so baleful ? Ireland is in chronic atrophy these

30 CHARTISM.

five centuries ; the disease of nobler England, identified now
with that of Ireland, becomes acute, has crises, and will be
cured or kill.

CHAPTEB V.

EIGHTS AND MIGHTS.

It is not what a man outwardly has or wants that constitutes
the happiness or misery of him. Nakedness, hunger, distress
of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when
the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insup-
portable to all men. The brutallest black African cannot bear
that he should be used unjustly. No man can bear it, oiiought
to bear it. A deeper law than any parchment-law whatsoever,
a law written direct by the hand of God in the inmost being
of man, incessantly protests against it. AYhat is injustice ?
Another name for (disorder, for unveracity, unreality ; a thing
which veracious created Nature, even because it is not Chaos
and a waste-whirling baseless Phantasm, rejects and disowns.
It is not the outward pain of injustice ; that, were it even the
laying of the back with knotted scourges, the severing of
the head with guillotines, is comparatively a small matter.
The real smart is the soul's pain and stigma, the hurt inflicted
on the moral self. The rudest clown must draw himself up
into attitude of battle, and resistance to the death, if such be
offered him. He cannot live under it ; his own soul aloud,
and all the universe with silent continual beckonings, says. It
cannot be. He must revenge himself ; revancher himself, make
himself good again, — that so meum may be mine, tuum thine,
and each party standing clear on his own basis, order be re-
stored. There is something infinitely respectable in this, and
we may say universally respected : it is the common stamp of
manhood vindicating itself in all of us, the basis of whatever
is worthy in all of us, and through superficial diversities, the
same in all.

As t^isorder, insane by the nature of it, is the hatefullest of
things to man, who lives by sanity and order, so injustice is
the worst evil, some call it the only evil, in this world. All

RIGHTS AND MIGHTS. 31

men submit to toil, to disappointment, to unliappiness ; it is
their lot here ; but in all hearts, inextinguishable by sceptic
logic, by sorrow, perversion or despair itself, there is a small
still voice intimating that it is not the final lot ; that wild,
waste, incoherent as it looks, a God presides over it ; that it
is not an injustice but a justice. Force itself, the hopeless-
ness of resistance, has doubtless a composing effect ; — against
inanimate Simooms, and much other infliction of the like sort,
we have found it suffice to produce complete composure. Yet,
one would ^ay, a permanent Injustice even from an Infinite
Power would prove unendurable by men. If men had lost
belief in a God, their only resource against a bhnd No-God,
of Necessity and Mechanism, that held them like a hideous
World-Steamengine, like a hideous Phalaris' Bull, imprisoned
in its own iron belly, would be, with or without hope, — revolt.
They could, as Novalis says, by a * simultaneous universal act
of suicide,' depart out of the AVorld-Steamengine ; and end, if
not in victory, yet in invincibility, and unsubduable protest
that such World-Steamengine was a failure and a stupidity.

Conquest, indeed, is a fact often witnessed ; conquest, which
seems mere wrong and force, everywhere asserts itself as a
right among men. Yet if we examine, we shall find that, in
this w^orld, no conquest could ever become permanent, which
did not withal shew itself beneficial to the .conquered as
well as to conquerors. IMithridates King of Pontus, come
now to extremity, * appealed to the patriotism of his people ; '
but, sa^^s the history, ' he had squeezed them, and fleeced and
plundered them, for long years ;' his requisitions, flying ii*-
regular, devastative, like the whirlwind, were less supportable
than Roman strictness and method, regular though never so
rigorous ; he therefore appealed to their patriotism in vain.
The Eomans conquered JVIithridates. The Romans, having
conquered the world, held it conquered, because they could
best govern the world ; the mass of men found it nowise press-
ing to revolt ; their fancy might be afflicted more or less, but
in their solid interests they were better off than before. So
too in this England long ago, the old Saxon Nobles, disunited
among themselves, and in power too nearly equal, could not

82 CHARTISM.

have governed the country well ; Harold being slain, their last
chance of governing it, except in anarchy and civil war, was
over ; a new class of strong Norman Nobles, entering with a
strong man, with a succession of strong men at the head of
them, and not disunited, but united by many ties, by their
very community of language and interest, had there been no
other, loere in a condition to govern it ; and did govern it, we
can beheve, in some rather tolerable manner, or they would
not have continued there. They acted, little conscious of such
function on their part, as an immense volunteer Police Force,
stationed everywhere, united, disciplined, feudally regimented,
ready for action ; strong Teutonic men ; who on the whole
proved effective men, and drilled this wild Teutonic people into
unity and peaceable co-operation better than others could have
done ! How can-do, if we will well intei^^ret it, unites itself
with sliall-do among mortals ; how strength acts ever as the
right-arm of justice ; how might and right, so frightfully dis-
crepant at first, are ever in the long-run one and the same, —
is a cheering consideration, which always in the black tem-
pestuous vortices of this world's history, will shine out on us,
like an everlasting polar star.

Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute
force and compulsion ; conquest of that kind does not endure.
Conquest, along with j^ower of compulsion, an essential "uni-
versally in human society, must bring benefit along with it,
or men, of the ordinary strength of men, will fiing it out.
The strong man, what is he if we will consider ? The wise
man ; the man with the gift of method, of faithfulness and
valour, all of which are of the basis of wisdom ; who has in-
sight into what is what, into what will follow out of what, the
eye to see and the hand to do ; who i^fit to administer, to di-
rect, and guidingly command : he is the strong man. His
muscles and bones are no stronger than ours ; but his soul is
stronger, his soul is wiser, clearer, — is better and nobler, for that
is, has been, and ever will be the root of all clearness worthy of
such a name. Beautiful it is, and a gleam from the same
eternal pole-star visible amid the destinies of men, that all
talent, all intellect is in the first place moral ; — what a world

RIGHTS AND MIGHTS. 33

were tins otherwise ! But it is the heart always that sees, be-
fore the head can see : let us know that ; and know therefore
that the Good alone is deathless and victorious, that Hope is
sure and steadfast, in all phases of this 'Place of Hope.' —
Shiftiness, quirk, attorney-cunning is a kind of thing that fan-
cies itself, and is often fancied, to be talent ; but it is luckily
mistaken in that. Succeed truly it does, what is called succeed-
ing ; and even must in general succeed, if the dispensers of
success be of due stupidity : men of due stupidity will needs
say to it, " Thou art wisdom, rule thou ! " — AVhereupon it
rules. But Nature answers, "No, this ruling of thine is not
according to mij laws ; thy wisdom w^as not wise enough 1
Dost thou take me too for a Quackery ? For a Convention-
ality and Attorneyism ? This chaff that thou sowest into my
bosom, though it pass at the poll-booth and elsewhere for
seed-corn, / will not grow w^heat out of it, for it is chaff ! "

But to return. Injustice, infideUty to truth and fact and
Nature's order, being proj^erly the one evil under the sun, and
the feeling of injustice the one intolerable pain under the sun,
our grand question as to the condition of these working men
would be : Is it just ? And first of all, What belief have they
themselves formed about the justice ,of it ? The words they
promulgate are notable by way of answer ; their actions are
still more notable. Chartism with its pikes, Swing with his
tinder-box, speak a most loud though inarticulate language.
Glasgow Thuggery speaks aloud too, in a language we may
well call infernal. What kind of ' wild-justice ' must it be in
the hearts of these men that prompts them, with cold delib-
eration, in conclave assembled, to doom their brother work-
man, as the deserter of his order and his order's cause, to die
as a traitor and deserter ; and have him executed, since not
by any public judge and hangman, then by a private one ; —
like your old Chivalry Femgericht, and Secret-Tribunal, sud-
denly in this strange guise become new ; suddenly rising
once more on the astonished eje, dressed now not in mail-
shirts but in fustian jackets, meeting not in Westphalian for-
ests but in the paved Gallowgate of Glasgow ! Not loyal lov- ■
ing obedience to those placed over them, but a far other
3

34 CHARTISM.

temper, must animate these men ! It is frightful enough.
Such temper must be wide -spread, virulent among the many,
when even in its worst acme, it can take such a form in a few.
But indeed decay of loyalty in all senses, disobedience, decay
of religious faith, has long been noticeable and lamentable in
this largest class, as in other smaller ones. Revolt, sullen re-
vengeful humour of revolt against the upper classes, decreasing
respect for what their temporal superiors command, decreasing
faith for what their spiritual superiors teach, is more and more
the universal spirit of the lower classes. Such spirit may be
blamed, may be vindicated ; but all men must recognize it as
extant there, all may know that it is mournful, that unless
altered it will be fatal. Of lower classes so related to upper,
happy nations are not made ! To whatever other griefs the
lower classes labour under, this bitterest and sorest grief now
superadds itself ; the unendurable conviction that they are
unfairly dealt with, that their lot in this world is not founded
on right, not even on necessity and might, is neither what it
should be, nor what it shall be.

Or why do we ask of Chartism, Glasgow Trades-Unions, and
such like ? Has not broad Europe heard the question put,
and answered, on the gri^at scale ; has not a Feench Revolution
been ? Since the year 178D, there is now half-a-century com-
plete ; and a French Revolution not yet complete ! Whoso-
ever will look at that enormous Phenomenon ma}' find many
meanings in it, but this meaning as the ground of all : That it
was a revolt of the oppressed lower classes against the oppress-
ing or neglecting upper classes : not a French revolt only ;
no, a European one ; full of stern monition to all countries of
Europe. These Chartisms, Radicalisms, Reform Bill, Tithe
Bill, and infinite other discrepancy, and acrid argument and
jargon that there is yet to be, are our French Revolution : God
grant that we with our better methods, may be able to trans-
act it by argument alone !

The French Revolution, now that we have sufficiently ex-
ecrated its horrors and crimes, is found to have had withal a
great meaning in it. As indeed, what great thing ever hajp-
pened in this world, a world understood always to be mao-v

RIGHTS AND MIGHTS. 35

and governed by a Providence and Wisdom, not by an Un-
wisdom, without meaning somewhat ? It was a tolerably
audible voice of proclamation, and universal oyez ! to all peo-
ple, this of three-and-twenty years' close fighting, sieging,
conflagrating, with a million or two of men shot dead : the
world ought to know by this time that it was verily meant in
earnest, that same Phenomenon, and had its own reasons for
ai)pearing there ! Which accordingly the world begins now
to do. The French Revolution is seen, or begins everywhere
to be seen, ' as the crowning phenomenon of our Modem
' Time ; the inevitable stern end of much ; the fearful, but also
' wonderful, indispensable and sternly beneficent beginning of
'much.' He who would understand the struggling convulsive
unrest of European society, in any and ever}' country, at this
day, may read it in broad glaring lines there, in that the most
convulsive phenomenon of the last thousand j^ears. EurojDe
lay pining, obstructed, moribund ; quack-ridden, hag-ridden,
— is there a hag, or spectre of the Pit, so baleful, hideous as
your accredited quack, were he never so close-shaven, mild-
spoken, plausible to himself and others ? Quack-ridden : in
that one word lies all misery wdiatsoever. Speciosity in all
departments usurps the place of reality, thrusts realit}- away ;
instead of performance, there is appearance of performance.
The quack is a Falsehood Incarnate ; and speaks, and makes
and does mere falsehoods, which Nature with her veracity has
to disown. As chief priest, as chief governor, he stands there,
intrusted with much. The husbandman of ' Time's Seedfield ; '
he is the world's hired sower, hired and solemnly appointed
to sow the kind true earth with wdieat this year, that next
year all men may have bread. He, miserable mortal, deceiv-
ing and self-deceiving, sows it, as we said, not with corn but
with chaff ; the world nothing doubting, harrows it in, l^ays
him his wages, dismisses him with blessing, and — next j^ear
there has no corn sprung. Natui-e has disowned the chaft',
has declined growing chaff, and behold now there is no bread !
It becomes necessary, in such case, to do several things ; not
soft things some of them, but hard.

Nay we will add that the very circumstance of quacks in

36 CHARTISM.

unusual quantity getting domination, indicates that the heart
of the world is already wrong. The impostor is false ; but
neither are his dupes altogether true : is not his first grand
dupe the falsest of all, — himself namely? Sincere men, of
never so limited intellect, have an instinct for discriminating
sincerity. The cunningest Mephistopheles cannot deceive a
simple Margaret of honest heart ; ' it stands written on his
brow.' Masses of people cajDable of being led away by quacks
are themselves of partially untrue spirit. Alas, in such times
it grows to be the universal belief, sole accredited knowing-
ness, and the contrary of it accounted puerile enthusiasm, this
sorrowfullest f/is'belief that there is j)roperly speaking any
truth in the world ; that the world was, has been, or ever can
be guided, except by simulation, dissimulation, and the suf-
ficiently dexterous practice of pretence. The faith of men is
dead : in what has guineas in its pocket, beefeaters riding be-
hind it, and cannons trundling before it, they can beheve ; in
what has none of these things they cannot believe. Sense for
the true and false is last ; there is properly no longer any true
or false. It is the heyday of Imposture ; of Semblance recog-
nising itself, and getting itself recognised, for Substance.
Gaping multitudes listen ; unlistening multitudes see not but
that it is all right, and in the order of Nature. Earnest men,
one of a million, shut their lips ; suppressing thoughts, which
there are no words to utter. To them it is too visible that
spiritual life has departed ; that material life, in whatsoever
figure of it, cannot long remain behind. To them it seems as
if our Europe of the Eighteenth Century, long hag-ridden,
vexed with foul enchanters, to the length now of gorgeous
Domdaniel Parca-aua'-cerfs and ' Peasants liviug on meal-liusks
and boiled grass,' had verily sunk down to die and dissolve ;
and were now, with its French Philosophisms, Hume Scepti-
cisms, Diderot Atheisms, maundering in the final deliration ;
writhing, with its Seven-years Silesian robber-wars, in the
final agony. Glory to God, our Europe was not to die but to
live ! Our Europe rose like a frenzied giant ; shook all that
poisonous magician trumpery to right and left, trampling it
stormfully under foot ; and declared aloud that there was

BIGHTS AND MIGHTS. 37

strengtli in him, not for life only, but for new and infinitely-
wider life. Antseus-like the giant had struck liis foot once
more upon Reality and the Earth ; there only, if in this uni-
verse at all, lay strength and healing for him. Heaven knows,
it was not a gentle process ; no wonder that it was a fearful
process, this same ' Phoenix fire-consummation ! ' But the
alternative was this or death ; the merciful Heavens, merciful
in their severity, sent us this rather.

And so the ' rights of man ' were to be written down on
paper ; and experimentally wrought upon towards elaboration,
in huge battle and wrestle, element conflicting with element,
from side to side of this Earth, for three-and-twenty years.
Rights of man, wrongs of man ? It is a question which has
swallowed whole nations and generations ; a question — on
which we will not enter here. Far be it from us ! Logic has
small business vnth. this question at present ; logic has no
plummet that will sound it at any time. But indee^J the
rights of man, as has been not unaptly remarked, are little
worth ascertaining in comparison to the mights of man, — to
what portion of his rights he has any chance of being able to
make good ! The accurate final rights of man lie in the far
deeps of the Ideal, where * the Ideal weds itself to the Possi-
ble,' as the Philosophers say. The ascertainable temporary
rights of man vary not a little, accordiug to place and time.
They are known to depend much on what a man's convictions
of them are. The Highland wife, with her husband at the
foot of the gallows, patted him on the shoulder (if there be
historical truth in Joseph Miller), and said amid her tears :
" Go uj), Donald, my man ; the Laird bids ye." To her it
seemed the rights of lairds were great, the rights of men
small ; and she acquiesced. Deputy Lapoule, in the Salle deti
Menus at Versailles, on the 4th of August, 1789, demanded
(he did actually ' demand,' and by unanimous vote obtain)
that the ' obsolete law ' authorizing a Seigneur, on his retui-n
from the chase or other needful fatigue, to slaughter not
above two of his vassals, and refresh his feet in their warm
blood and bowels, should be ' abrogated.' From such obso-
lete law, or mad tradition and phantasm of an obsolete law,

38 CHARTISM.

down to any corn-law, game-law, rotten-borough law, or other
law or practice clamoured of in this time of ours, the distance
travelled over is great ! — What are the rights of men ? All
men are justified in demanding and searching for their rights ;
moreover, justified or not, they will do it : by Chartisms,
Kadicalisms, French Ke volutions, or whatsoever methods they
have. Rights surely are right : on the other hand, this other
saying is most true, ' Use every man according to his i^ights,
and who shall escape whipping ! ' These two things, we say,
are both true ; and both are essential to make up the whole
truth. -All good men know always and feel, each for himself,
that the one is not less true than the other ; and act accord-
ingly. The contradiction is of the surface only ; as in oppo-
site sides of the same fact : universal in this dualism of a life
we have. Between these two extremes, Society and all human
things must fluctuatingly adjust themselves the best they can.
And yet that there is verily a ' rights of man ' let no mortal
doubt. An ideal of right does dwell in all men, in all arrange-
ments, pactions and procedures- of men ; it is to this ideal of
right, more and more developing itself as it is more and more
approximated to, that human Society for ever tends and strug-
gles. We say also that any given thing either is unjust or
else just ; however obscure the arguings and strugglings on it
be, the thing in itself there as it lies, infallibly enough, is the
one or the other. To which let us add only this, the first,
last article of faith, the alpha and omega of all faith among
men. That nothing which is unjust can hope to continue in
this world. A faith true in all times, more or less forgotten
in most, but altogether frightfully brought to remembrance
again in ours ! Lyons fusilladings, Nantes noyadings, reigns
of terror, and such other universal battle-thunder and explo-
sion ; these, if we will understand them, were but a new irre-
fragable preaching abroad of that. It would appear that
Speciosities which are not Realities cannot any longer inhabit
this world. It would appear that the unjust thing has no
friend in the Heaven, and a majority against it on the earth ;
nay, that it has at bottom all men for its enemies ; that it may
take shelter in this fallacy and then in that, but will be hunted

LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 39

from fallacy to fallacy, till it find no fallacy to shelter in any
more, but must march and go elsewhither ; — that, in a word,
it ought to prepare incessantly for decent departure, before
indecent departure, ignominious drumming out, nay savage
smiting out and burning out, overtake it ! Alas, was that
such new tidings ? Is it not from of old indubitable, that
Untruth, Injustice which is but acted untruth, has no power
to continue in this true universe of ours ? The tidings w^as
world-old, or older, as old as the Fall of Lucifer : and yet in
that epoch unhappily it was new tidings, unexpected, incredi-
ble ; and there had to be such earthquakes and shakings of
the nations before it could be listened to, and laid to heart
even slightly ! Let us lay it to heart, let us know it well that
new shakings be not needed. Known and laid, to heart it
must everywhere be, before peace can pretend to come. This
seems to us the secret of our convulsed era ; this which is so
easily written, which is and has been and will be so hard to
bring to pass. All true men, high and low, each in his sphere,
are consciously or unconsciously bringing it to pass ; all false
and half-true men are fruitlessly spending themselves to hin-
der it from coming to pass.

CHAPTER VI.

LAISSEZ-FAIEE.

From all which enormous events, with truths old and
new embodied in them, what innumerable practical infer-
ences are to be drawn ! Events are written lessons, glaring
in huge hieroglyphic picture-writing, that all may read and
know them : the terror and horror they inspire is but the
note of preparation for the truth they are to teach ; a mere
waste of terror if that be not learned. Inferences enough ;
most didactic, practically applicable in all departments of
English things ! One inference, but one inclusive of all, shall
content us here ; this namely : That Laissez-faire has as good
as done its part in a great many provinces ; that in the prov-
ince of the Working Classes, Laissez-faire having passed its

40 CHARTISM.

New Poor-Law, has reached the suicidal point and now, as
felo-de-se, lies dying there, in torchlight meetings and such
like ; that, in brief, a government of the under classes by the
upper on a principle of Let alone is no longer possible in Eng-
land in these days. This is the one inference inclusive of all.
For there can be no acting or doing of any kind, till it be
recognised that there is a thing to be done ; the thing once
recognised, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.
The Working Classes cannot any longer go on without govern-
ment ; without being actually guided and governed ; England
cannot subsist in peace till, by some means or other, some
guidance and government for them is found.

For, alas, on us too the rude truth has come home. "Wrap-
pages and speciosities all worn off, the haggard naked fact
speaks to us : Are these millions taught ? Ai'e these millions
guided ? We have a Church, the venerable embodiment of
an idea which may well call itself divine ; which our fathers
for long ages, feeling it to be divine, have been embodying as
we see : it is a Church well furnished with equipments and
appurtenances ; educated in universities ; rich in money ; set
on high places that it may be conspicuous to all, honoured of
all. We have an Aristocracy of landed wealth and commer-
cial wealth, in whose hands lies the law-making and the law-
administering ; an Aristocracy rich, powerful, long secure in
its place ; an Aristocracy with more faculty put free into its
hands than was ever before, in any country or time, put into
the hands of any class of men. This Church answers : Yes, the
people are taught. This Aristocracy, astonishment in every
feature, answers : Yes, surely the people are guided ! Do
we not pass what Acts of Parliament are needful ; as many as
thirty-nine for the shooting of the partridges alone ? Are there
not tread-mills, gibbets ; even hospitals, poor-rates, New Poor-
Law ? So answers Church ; so answers Ai^istocracy, astonish-
ment in every feature. — Fact, in the meanwhile, takes his luci-
fer-box, sets fire to wheat-stacks ; sheds an all-tog dismal light
on several things. Fact searches for his third-rate potatoe,
not in the meekest humour, six-and-thirty weeks each year ;
and does not find it. Fact pas&'lonately joins Messiah Thorn

LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 41

of Canterbury, and lias himself shot for a new fifth-monarchy
brought in by Bedlam. Fact holds his fustian-jacket Feni-
gericht in Glasgow City. Fact carts his Petition over London
streets, begging that you would simply have the goodness to
grant him universal suffrage, and ' the five points,' by way of
remedy. These are not symptoms of teaching and guiding.

Nay, at bottom, is it not a singular thing this of Laisaez-
faire, from the first origin of it ? As good as an abdication on
the part of governors ; an admission that they are henceforth
incompetent to govern, that they are not there to govern at
all, but to do — one knows not what ! The universal demand
of Laissez-faire by a people from its governors or upper
classes, is a soft-sounding demand ; but it is only one step
removed from the fatallest. ' Laissez-faire,' exclaims a sar-
donic German writer, ' What is this universal cry for Laissez-
faire ? Does it mean that human affairs require no guid-
' ance ; that wisdom and forethought cannot guide them bet-
' ter than folly and accident ? Alas, does it not mean : ^' Such
' guidance is worse than none ! Leave us alone of your guid-
* ance ; eat your wages, and sleep ! "' And now if guidance
have grown indispensable, and the sleep continue, what be-
comes of the sleep and its wages ? — In those entii-ely surpris-
ing circumstances to which the Eighteenth Century had
brought us, in the time of Adam Smith, Laissez-faire was a
reasonable cry ; — as indeed, in all circumstances, for a wise
governor there will be meaning in the principle of it. To
wise governors you will cry : " See what 3'ou will, and will
not, let alone." To unwise governors, to hungry Greeks
throttling down hungry Greeks on the floor of a St. Stephens,
you will cry : "Let all things alone ; for Heaven's sake, med-
dle ye with nothing!" 'R.ovf Laissez-faire may adjust itself
in other provinces we say not : but we do venture to say, and
ask whether events everywhere in world-history and parish-
history, in all manner of dialects are not saying it. That in
regard to the lower orders of society, and their governance and
guidance, the principle of Laissez-faire has terminated, and is
no longer applicable at all, in this Europe of ours, still less
in this England of ours. Not misgovernment, nor yet no-

42 CHARTISM.

government : only government will now serve. What is the
meaning of the 'five points,' if we will understand them?
What are all popular commotions and maddest bellowings,
from Peterloo to the Place-de-Greve itself? Bellowings, in-
articulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain ; to
the ear of wisdom they are inarticulate prayers : " Guide me,
govern me ! I am mad, and miserable, and cannot guide my-
self!" Sui'ely of all 'rights of man,' this right of the igno-
rant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly,
held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest. Nature
herself ordains it from the first ; Society struggles towards
perfection by enforcing and accomplishing it more and more.
If Freedom have any meaning, it means enjoyment of this
right, wherein all other rights are enjoyed. It is a sacred
right and duty, on both sides ; and the summary of all social
duties whatsoever between the two. Why does the one toil
with his hands, if the other be not to toil, still more un-
weariedty, with heart and head ? The brawny craftsman finds
it no child's play to mould his unpliant rugged masses ;
neither is guidance of men a dilettantism : what it becomes
when treated as a delettantism, we may see ! The wild horse
bounds homeless through the wilderness, is not led to stall
and manger : but neither does he toil for you, but for himself
only. .

Democracy, we are well aware, what is called ' self-govern-
ment ' of the multitude by the multitude, is in words the thing
everywhere passionately clamoured for at present. Democ-
racy makes rapid progress in these latter times, and ever more
rapid, in a perilous accelerative ratio ; towards democracy,
and that only, the progress of things is everywhere tending
as to the final goal and winning-post. So think, so clamour
the multitudes everywhere. And yet all men may see, whose
sight is good for much, that in democracy can lie no finality ;
that with the completest winning of democracy there is noth-
ing yet won, — except emptiness, and the free chance to win !
Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self -cancelling business :
and gives in the long-run a net-result of zero. Where no
government is wanted, save that of the parish-constable, as in

LAISSEZ-FAIRB. 43

America with its boundless soil, every man being able to find
work and recompense for himself, democracy may subsist ;
not elsewhere, except briefly, as a swift transition towards
something other and farther. Democracy never yet, that we
heard of, was able to accomplish much work, beyond that
same cancelling of itself. Rome and Athens are themes for
the schools ; unexceptionable for that purpose. In Rome and
Athens, as elsewhere, if we look practically, we shall find that
it was not by loud voting and debating of many, but by wise
insight and ordering of a few that the work was done. So is
it ever, so will it ever be. The French Convention was a
Parliament elected 'by the five points,' with ballot-boxes, uni-
versal suffrages, and what not, as perfectly as Parliament can
hope to be in this world ; and had indeed a pretty spell of
work to do, and did it. The French Convention had to cease
from being a h^ee Parliament, and become more arbitrary than
any Sultan Bajazet, before it could so much as subsist. It
had to purge out its argumentative Girondins, elect its Su-
preme Committee of Salut, guillotine into silence and extinc-
tion all that gainsayed it, and rule and work literally by the
sternest despotism ever seen in Europe, before it could rule
at all. Napoleon was not president of a republic ; Cromwell
tried hard to rule in that way, but found that he could not.
These, 'the armed soldiers of democracy,' had to chain democ-
racy under their feet, and become despots over it, before they
could work out the earnest obscure purpose of democracy it-
self ! Democracy, take it where you will in our Europe, is
found but as a regulated method of rebellion and abrogation ;
it abrogates the old arrangement of things ; and leaves, as we
say, zej'o and vacuity for the institution of a new arrangement.
It is the consummation of No-government and Laissez-faire.
It may be natural for our Europe at present ; but cannot be
the ultimatum of it. Not towards the impossibility, 'self-
government ' of a multitude by a multitude ; but towards some
possibility, government by the wisest, does bewildered Europe
struggle. The blessedest possibility : not misgovernment,
not Laissez-faire, but veritable government ! Cannot one dis-
cern too, across all democratic turbulence, clattering of ballot-

44 CHARTISM.

boxes and infinite sorrowful jangle, needful or not, that this
at bottom is the wish and prayer of all human hearts, every-
where and at all times : " Give me a leader ; a true leader, not
a false sham-leader ; a true leader, that he may guide me on
the true way, that I may be loyal to him, that I may swear
fealty to him and follow him, and feel that it is well with me 1 "
The relation of the taught to their teacher, of the loyal sub-
ject to his guiding king, is, under one shape or another, the
vital element of human Society ; indispensable to it, perennial
in it ; without which, as a body reft of its soul, it falls down
into death, and with horrid noisome dissolution passes away
and disappears.-

But verity in these times, with their new stern Evangel, that
Speciosities which are not Realities can no longer be, all Aris-
tocracies, Priesthoods, Persons in Authority, are called upon
to consider. What is an Aristocracy^ ? A corporation of the
Best, of the Bravest. To this joyfully, with heart-loyalty, do
men pay the half of their substance, to equip and decorate
their Best, to lodge them in palaces, to set them high over all.
For it is of the nature of men, in every time, to honour and
love their Best ; to know no limits in honouring them. What-
soever Aristocracy is still a corporation of the Best, is safe from
all peril, and the land it rules is a safe and blessed land. What-
soever Aristocracy does not even attempt to be that, but only
to wear the clothes of that, is not safe ; neither is the land it
rules in safe ! For this now is our sad lot, that we must find
a i^eal Aristocracy, that an apparent Aristocracy, how plausible
soever, has become inadequate for us. One way or other, the
world will absolutely need to be governed ; if not by this class
of men, then by that. One can predict, without gift of proph-
ecy, that the era of routine is nearly ended. Wisdom and fac-
ulty alone, faithful, valiant, ever-zealous, not pleasant but pain-
ful, continual effort, will suffice. Cost what " it may, by one
means or another, the toiling multitudes of this perj)lexed
over-crowded Europe, must and will find governors. ' Laissez-
faire, Leave them to do ? ' The thing they will do, if so left,
is too frightful to think of ! It has been done once, in sight

LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 45

of the whole earth, in these generations ; can it need to be
done a second time ?

For a Priesthood, in like manner, whatsoever its titles, pos-
sessions, professions, there is but one question : does it teach
and spiritually guide this people, j-ea or no ? If yea, then is
all well. But if no, then let it strive earnestly to alter, for as
3^et there is nothing well ! Nothing, we say : and indeed is not
this that we call spiritual guidance j)roperly the soul of the
whole, the life and ej-'esight of the whole ? The world asks of
its Church in these times, more passionately than of any other
Institution any question, "Canst thou teach us or not?" — A
Priesthood in France, when the world asked, " What canst
thou do for us ? " answered only, aloud and ever louder, " Are
we not of God ? Invested with all power ? " — till at length
France cut short this controversy too, in what frightful way
we know. To all men who believed in the Church, to all men
who believed, in God and the soul of man, there was no issue
of the French Revolution half so sorrowful as that. France
cast out its benighted blind Priesthood into destruction ; yet
with what a loss to France also ! A solution of continuity,
what we may well call such ; and this where continuity is so
momentous : the New, whatever it may be, cannot now grow
out of the Old, but is severed sheer asunder from the Old, —
how much lies wasted in that gap ! That one whole genera-
tion of thinkers should be without a religion to beheve, or
even to contradict ; that Christianitj', in thinking France,
should as it were fade away so long into a remote extraneous
tradition, was one of the saddest facts connected with the
future of that country. Look at such Political and Moral
Philosophies, St.-Simonisms, Robert-Macairisms, and the 'Lit-
erature of Desperation ' ! Kingship was perhaps but a cheap
waste, compared with this of the Priestship ; under which
France still, all but unconsciously, labours ; and may long la-
bour, remediless the while. Let others consider it, and take
warning by it ! France is a jDregnant example in all ways.
Ai'istocracies that do not govern. Priesthoods that do not
teach ; the miser}'- of that, and the misery of altering that, — ■
are written in Belshazzar fire-letters on the history of France.

46 CHARTISM.

Or does the Britisli reader, safe in the assurance that * Enjj.
land is not France,' call all this unpleasant doctrine of ours
ideology, perfectability, and a vacant dream ? Does the Brit-
ish reader, resting on the faith that what has been these two
generations was from the beginning, and will be to the end,
assert to himself that things are already as they can be, as
they must be ; that on the whole, no Upper Classes did ever
' govern ' the Lower, in this sense of governing ? Believe it
not, O British reader ! Man is man everywhere ; dislikes to
have ' sensible species ' and ' ghosts of defunct bodies ' foisted
on him, in England even as in France. How much the Upper
Classes did actually, in any of the most perfect Feudal time,
return to the Under by way of recompense, in government,
guidance, protection, we will not undertake to specify here.
In Charity-Balls, Soup-Kitchens, in Quarter-Sessions, Prison-
Discipline and Treadmills, we can well believe the old Feudal
Aristocracy not to have surpassed the new. Yet we do say
that the old Aristocracy were the governors of the Lower
Classes, the guides of the Lower Classes ; and even, at bottom,
that they existed as an Aristocracy because they were found
adequate for that. Not by Charity-Balls and Soup-Kitchens ;
not so ; far otherwise ! But it was their happiness that, in
struggling for their own objects, they Aac? to govern the Lower
Classes, even in this sense of governing. For, in one word,
Gash Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole
nexus of man to man ; it was something other than money
that the high then expected from the low, and could not live
without getting from the low. Not as buyer and seller alone,
of land or what else it might be, but in many senses still as
soldier and captain, as clansman and head, as loyal subject
and guiding king, was the low related to the high. With the
supreme triumpli of Cash, a changed time has entered ; there
must a changed Aristocracy enter. AVe invite the British
reader to meditate earnestly on these things.

Another thing, which the British reader often reads and
hears in this time, is worth his meditating for a moment :
That Society ' exists for the protection of property.' To which
it is added, that the poor man also has property, namely, his

LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 47

'labour,' and the fifteen-pence or three -an d-sixpence a-day
lie can get for that. True enough, O friends, ' for protectmg
properly ; ' most true : and indeed if you will once sufficiently
enforce that Eighth Commandment, the whole ' rights of man '
are well cared for : I know no better definition of the rights
of man. Thou shall not steal, thou shall not he stolen from :
what a Society were that ; Plato's Republic, Moore's Utopia
mere emblems of it ! Give every man what is his, the accu-
ate price of what he has done and been, no man shall any
more complain, neither shall the earth sutler any more. For
the protection of property, in very truth, and for that alone !
— And now what is thy property ? That parchment title-deed,
that purse thou buttonest in thy breeches-pocket ? Is that
thy valuable property ? Unhappy brother, most poor insol-
vent brother, I without parchment at all, with purse oftenest
in the flaccid state, imponderous, which will not fling against
the wind, have quite other property than that ! I have the
miraculous breath of Life in me, breathed into my nostrils
by Almighty God. I have affections, thoughts, a god-given
capability to be and do ; rights, therefore, — the right for in-
stance to thy love if I love thee, to thy guidance if I obey thee :
the strangest rights, whereof in church-pulpits one still hears
something, though almost unintelligible now ; rights, stretch-
ing high into Immensity, far into Eternity ! Fifteen-pence
a-day ; three-and-sixpence a-day ; eight hundred pounds and
odd a-day, dost thou call that my property ? I value that but
little ; little all I could purchase with that. For truly, as is
said, what matters it ? In torn boots, in soft-hung carriages-
and-four, a man gets always to his journey's end. Socrates
walked barefoot, or in wooden shoes, and yet arrived hapj^ily.
They never asked him, What shoes or conveyance? never,
What wages hadst thou? but simply. What work didst thou?
Property, O brother ? ' Of my very body I have but a life-
rent.' As for this flaccid purse of mine, 'tis something, noth-
ing ; has been the slave of pickpockets, cutthroats, Jew-brok-
ers, gold-dust robbers ; 'twas his, 'tis mine ; — 'tis thine, ' if
thou care much to steal it. But my soul, breathed into me
by God, my Me and what capability is there ; that is mine.

48 CHARTISM.

and I will resist the stealing of it. I call that m'ine and not
thine ; I will keep that, and do what work I can with it : God
has given it me, the Devil shall not take it away ! — Alas, my
friends, Society exists and has existed for a great many pur-
poses, not so easy to specify !

Societ}", it is understood, does not in any age, prevent a
man from being what he can he. A sooty African can become
a Toussaint L'ouverture, a murderous Three-fingered Jack,
let the yellow West Indies say to it what they will. A Scot-
tish Poet, ' proud of his name and country,' can apply fei*vently
to ' Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt,' and become a ganger
of beer-barrels, and tragical immortal broken-hearted Singer ;
the stifled echo of his melody audible through long centuries,
one other note in ' that sacred Miserere ' that rises up to
Heaven, out of all times and lands. What I can he thou de-
cidedly wilt not hinder me from being. Nay even for being
what I could he, I have the strangest claims on thee, — not
convenient to adjust at present ! Protection of breeches-
pocket property ? O reader, to what shifts is poor Society
reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in
epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man
to men ! On the whole, we will advise Society not to talk at
all about what she exists for ; but rather with her whole in-
dustry to exist, to try how she can keep existing ! That is
her best plan. She may depend upon it, if she ever, by cruel •
chance, did come to exist only for protection of breeches-
pocket property, she would lose very soon the gift of pro-
tecting even that, and find her career in our lower world on
the point of terminating ! —

For the rest, that in the most perfect Feudal Ages, the
Ideal of Aristocracy nowhere lived in vacant serene purity as
an Ideal, but always as a poor imperfect Actual, little heeding
or not knowing at all that an Ideal lay in it, — this too we will
cheerfully admit. Imperfection, it is known, cleaves to human
things ; far is the Ideal departed from, in most times ; very
far ! And yet so long as an Ideal (any soul of Truth) does,
in never so confused a manner, exist and work within the

NOT LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 49

Actual, it is a tolerable business. Not so, when the Ideal has
entirely departed, and the Actual owns to itself that it hay
no Idea, no soul of Truth any longer : at that degree of im-
perfection human things cannot continue living ; they are
obliged to alter or expire, when they attain to that. Blotches
and diseases exist on the skin and deeper, the heart continu-
ing whole ; but it is another matter when the heart itself be-
comes diseased ; when there is no heart, but a monstrous
gangrene pretending to exist there as heart !

On the whole, O reader, thou wilt find everywhere that
things which have had an existence among men have first of
all had to have a truth and worth in them, and were not sem-
blances but realities. Nothing but a reality ever yet got men
to pay bed and board to it for long. Look at Mahometanism
itself ! Dalai-Lamaism, even Dalai-Lamaism, one rejoices to
discover, may be worth its victuals in this world ; not a quack-
ery but a sincerity ; not a nothing but a something ! The
mistake of those who believe that fraud, force, injustice,
whatsoever untrue thing, howsoever cloaked and decorated,
was ever or can ever be the principle of man's relations to
man, is great, and the greatest. It is the error of the infidel ;
in whom the truth as yet is not. It is an error pregnant with
mere errors and miseries ; an error fatal, lamentable, to be
abandoned by all men.

CHAPTEE VII.

NOT LAISSEZ-FAIEE.

How an Aristocracy, in these present times and circum-
stances, could, if never so well disposed, set about governing
the Upper Class ? What they should do ; endeavour or attempt
to do ? That is even the question of questions : — the question
which they have to solve ; which it is our utmost function at
present to teU them, lies there for solving, and must and will
be solved.

Insoluble we cannot fancy it. One select class Society has
furnished with wealth, intelligence, leisure, means outward

4

50 • CHARTISM.

and inward for governing ; another huge class, furnished by
Society with none of these things, declare^ tliat it must be
governed : Negative stands fronting Positive ; if Negative and
Positive cannot unite, — it will be worse for both ! Let the
faculty and earnest constant eftbrt of England combine round
this matter ; let it once be recognised as a vital matter. Innu-
merable things our Upj)er Classes and Lawgivers might ' do ; '
but the preliminary of all things, we must repeat, is to know
that a thing must needs be done. We lead them liere to the
shore of a boundless continent ; ask them. Whether they do
not with their own eyes see it, see strange symptoms of it,
lying huge, dark, unexplored, inevitable ; full of hope, but
also full of difficulty, savagery, 9,lmost of despair ? Let them
enter ; they must enter ; Time and Necessity have brought
them hither ; where they are is no continuing ! Let them
enter ; the first step once taken, the next will have become
clearer, all future steps wdll become possible. It is a great
problem for all of us ; but for themselves, we may say, more
than for any. On them chiefly, as the expected solvers of it,
will the failure of a solution first fall. One way or other
there must and will be a solution.

True, these matters lie far, very far indeed, from the * usual
habits of Parliament,' in late times ; from the routine course
of any Legislative or Administrative body of men that exists
among us. Too true ! And that is even the thing we com-
plain of : had the mischief been looked into as it gradually
rose, it would not have attained this magnitude. That self-
canceUing Donothingism and Laisaez-faire should have got so
ingrained into our Practice, is the source of all these miseries.
It is too true that Parliament, for the matter of near a cen-
tury now, has been able to undertake the adjustment of al-
most one thing alone, of itself and its own interests ; leaviog
other interests to rub along very much as they could and
would. True, this was the practice of the whole Eighteenth
Century ; and struggles still to prolong itself into the Nine-
teenth,— which however is no longer the time for it ! Those
Eighteenth-century Parliaments, one may hope, w411 become a
curious object one day. Are not these same ' Memoires ' of

NOT LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 51

Horace Walpole, to an unparliamentary eye, already a curious
object ? One of tlie clearest-sighted men of the Eighteenth
Century writes down his Parliamentary observation of it there ;
a determined despiser and merciless dissector of cant ; a lib-
eral withal, one who will go all lengths for the ' glorious rev-
olution ' and resist Tory principles to the death : he writes,
with an indignant elegiac feeling, how Mr. This, who had
voted so and then voted so, and was the son of tliis and the
brother of that, and had such claims to the fat appointment,
was nevertheless scandalously postponed to Mr. That ; — where-
upon are not the affairs of this nation in a bad way ? How
hungry Greek meets hungiy Greek on the floor of St. Ste-
phens, and wrestles him and throttles him till he has to cry,
Hold ! the office is thine ! — of this does Horace write. — One
must say, the destinies of nations do not always rest entirely
on Parliament. One must say, it is a wonderful affair that
science of ' government ' as practised in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury of the Christian era, and still struggling to practise it-
self. One must say, it was a lucky century that could get it
so practised : a century which had inherited richly from its
predecessors ; and also which did, not unnaturally, bequeath
to its successors a French Revolution, general overtui'n, and
reign of terror ; — intimating, in most audible thunder, confla-
gration, guillotinement, cannonading and universal war and
earthquake, that such century with its practices had ended.

Ended ; — for decidedly that course of procedure will no
longer serve. Parliament will absolutely, with whatever effort,
have to lift itself out of those deep ruts of donothing routine ;
and learn to say, on all sides, something more edifying than
Laissez-faire. If Parliament cannot learn it, what is to become
of Parliament ? The toiling millions of England ask of their
English Parliament foremost of all, Canst thou govern us or
not ? Parliament with its privileges is strong ; but Necessity
and the Laws of Nature are stron^-er than it. If Parliament
cannot do this thing, Parliament we prophesy will do some
other thing and things which, in the strangest and not the
happiest way, will forward its being done, — not much to the
advantage of Parliament probably ! Done, one way or other,

o2 CHARTISM.

the thing must be. In these complicated times, with Cash
Payment as the sole nexus between man and man, the Toiling
Classes of mankind declare, in their confused but most em-
phatic way, to the Untoiling, that they will be governed ; that
they must — under penalty of Chartisms, Thuggeries, Kick-
burnings, and even blacker things than those. Vain also is it
to think that the misery of one class, of the great universal
under class, can be isolated and kept apart and peculiar, down
in that class. By infallible contagion, evident enough to re-
flection, evident even to Political Economy that will reflect,
the misery of the lowest spreads upwards and upwards till it
reaches the very highest ; till all has grown miserable, palpa-
bly false and wrong ; and poor drudges hungering 'on meal-
husks and boiled grass ' do, by circuitous but sure methods,
bring kings' heads to the block !

Cash Payment the sole nexus ; and there are so many
things which cash will not pay ! Cash is a great miracle ; yet
it has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth. ' Supj^ly
and demand ' we will honour also ; and yet how many ' de-
mands ' are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go
elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than
cash, before they can get their supply ! On the whole, what
astonishing payments does cash make in this world ! Of your
Samuel Johnson furnished with ' fourpence halfpenny a-day,'
and solid lodging at nights on the paved streets, as his pay-
ment, we do not speak ; — not in the way of complaint : it is
a world-old business for the like of him, that same arrange-
ment or a worse ; perhaps the man, for his own uses, had
need even of that and of no better. Nay is not Society, busy
with its Talfoui-d Co23yright Bill and the like, struggling to
do something effectual for that man ; — enacting with all indus-
try that his own creation be accounted his own manufacture,
and continue unstolen, on his own market-stand, for so long
as sixty years ? Perhaps Society is right there ; for discrep-
ancies on that side too may become excessive. All men are
not patient docile Johnsons ; some of them are half-mad in-
flammable Eosseaus. Such, in peculiar times, you may drive
too far. In FraneGj for example, Society was not destitute of

NEW ERAS. 53

cash ; Society contrived to pay Philippe d'Orleans not yet Ega-
Hte three hundred thousand a-year and odd, for dri\ing cabri-
olets through the streets of Paris and other work done : but in
cash, encouragement, arrangement, recompense or recognition
of any hind, it had nothing to give this same half-mad Kos-
seau for his work done ; whose brain in consequence, too
' much enforced ' for a w^eak brain, uttered hasty sparks, Gon-
trat Social and the like, which proved not so quenchable again !
In regard to that species of men too, who knows whether
Laissez-faire itself (which is Sergeant Talfourd's Copyright
Bill continued to eternity instead of sixty years) will not turn
out insufficient, and have to cease, one day ? —

Alas, in regard to so very many things, Laissez-faire ought
partly to endeavour to cease ! But in regard to poor Sans-
potatoe peasants, Trades-Union craftsmen, Chartist cotton-
spinners, the time has come when it must either cease or
a worse thing straightway begin, — a thing of tinder-boxes,
vitriol-bottles, second-hand pistols, a visibly insupportable
thing in the eyes of all.

CHAPTEK Vm.

NEW ERAS.

For in very truth it is a ' new Era ; ' a new Practice has be-
come indispensable in it. One has heard so often of new
eras, new and newest eras, that the world has grown rather
empty of late. Yet new eras do come ; there is no fact surer
than that they have come more than once. And always with
a change of era, with a change of intrinsic conditions, there
had to be a change of practice and outward relations brought
about,— if not peaceably, then by violence ; for brought about
it had to be, there could no rest come till then. How many
eras and epochs, not noted at the moment ; — which indeed is
the blessedest condition of epochs, that they come quietly,
making no proclamation of themselves, and are only visible
long after : a Cromwell Eebellion, a French Revolution,
' striking on the Horologe of Time,' to tell all mortals what
o'clock it has become, are too expensive, if one could help it !—

54 CHARTISM.

In a strange rhapsodic ' History of the Teuton Kindred
(Geschichte der Teutschen SipjDSchaft),' not yet translated into
our language, we have found a Chapter on the Eras of Eng-
land, which, were there room for it, would be instructive in
this place. We shall crave leave to excerpt some pages ;
partly as a relief from the too near vexations of our own
rather sorrowful Era ; partly as calculated to throw, more or
less obliquely, some degree of light on the meanings of that.
The Author is anonymous ; but we have heard him called the
Herr Professor Sauerteig, and indeed think we know him
under that name :

' Who shall say what work and works this England has yet
' to do ? For what purpose this land of Britain was created,
' set like a jewel in the encircling blue of Ocean ; and this
' Tribe of Saxons, fashioned in the depths of Time, '' on the
'shores of the Black Sea" or elsewhere, "out of Harzebirge
' rock " or whatever other material, was sent travelling hither-

* ward ? No man can say : it was for a work, and for works,
' incapable of announcement in words. Thou seest them

* there, these works ; part of them stand done, and visible to

* the eye ; even these thou canst not name : how much less
' the others still matter of prophecy only ! — They live and
' labour there, these twenty million Saxon men ; they have

* been born into this mj^stery of life out of the darkness of

* Past Time : — how changed now since the first Father and

* first Mother of them set forth, quitting the Tribe of TJieuth,
*with passionate farewell, under questionable auspices; on
' scanty bullock-cart, if they had even bullocks and a cart ;
' with axe and hunting-sj)ear, to subdue a portion of our com-
' mon Planet ! This Nation now has cities and seedfields, has
' spring-vans, dray-w^aggons. Long-acre carriages, nay railway
' trains ; has coined money, exchange-bills, laws, books, war-
' fleets, spinning jennies, warehouses and West-India Docks :
' see what it has built and done, what it can and will yet build
' and do ! These umbrageous pleasure-woods, green meadows,
' shaven stubble-fields, smooth-sweeping roads ; these high-
' domed cities, and what they hold and bear ; this mild Good-

NEW ERAS. 55

'morrow which the stranger bids thee, equitable, nay for-
'bearant if need were, judicially calm and law-observing
'towards thee a stranger, what work has it not cost? How
' many brawny arms, generation after generation, sank down
'wearied ; how many noble hearts, toiling while life lasted,

* and wise heads that wore themselves dim with scanning and
'discerning, before this waste Whiteclijf, Albion so-called,
'with its other Cassiterides Tin Islands, became a British
' Empire ! The stream of World-History has altered its com-
'plexion ; Romans are dead out, Enghsh are come in. The
' red broad mark of Romanhood, stamped ineffaceably on that
' Chart of Time, has disappeared from the present, and be-
' longs only to the past, England plays its part ; England too

* has a mark to leave, and we will hope none of the least sig-
' nificant. Of a truth, whosoever had, with the bodily eye,
' seen Hengst and Horsa mooring on the mud-beach of
'Thanet, on that spring morning of the Year* 449 ; and then,
'with the spiritual eye, looked forward to. New York, Cal-
' cutta, Sidney Cove, across the ages and the oceans ; and

* thought what Wellingtons, Washingtons, Shakspears, Mil-
'tons, Watts, Arkwrights, William Pitts and Davie Crocketts
' had to issue from that business, and do their several task-

* words so, — he would have said, those leather-boats of HeiiGfst's
' had a kind of cargo in them ! A genealogic Mythus superior
' to any in the old Greek, to almost any in the old Hebrew
' itself ; and not a Mythus either, but every fibre of it fact.
' An Ei^ic Poem was there, and all manner of poems ; except

* that the Poet has not yet made his appearance.'

' Six centuries of obscure endeavour,' continues Sauerteig,

* which to read Historians, you would incline to call mere ob-
' scure slaughter, discord, and misendeavour ; of which all
' that the human memory, after a thousand readings, can re-
' member, is that it resembled, what Milton names it, the
' "flocking and fighting of kites and crows;" this, in brief,
' is the histor}' of the Heptarchy or Seven Kingdoms. Six
' centuries ; a stormy springtime, if there ever was one, for a
' Nation. Obscure fighting of kites and crows, however, was

* not the History of it ; but was only what the dim Historians

56 - CHARTISM.

of it saw good to record. Were not forests felled, bogs
drained, fields made arable, towns built, laws made, and the
Thought and Practice of men in many ways perfected ? Ven-
erable Bede had got a lang-uage which he could now not only
speak, but spell and ^Mt on paper : think what lies in that.
Bemurmured by the German sea-flood swinging slow with
sullen roar against those hoarse Northumbrian rocks, the
venerable man set down several things in a legible man-
ner. Or was the smith idle, hammering only war-tools ? He
had learned metallurgy, stithy-work in general ; and made
plough-shares withal, and adzes and mason-hammers. Cas-
tra, Caesters or Chesters, Dons, Tons [Zauns, Inclosui'es or
Toivns), not a few, did they not stand there ; of burnt brick,
of timber, of lath-and-clay ; sending up the peaceable smoke
of hearths ? England had a History then too ; though no
Historian to write it. Those " flockings and fightings," sad
inevitable necessities, were the expensive tentative steps
towards some capability of living and working in concert :
experiments they were, not always conclusive, to ascertain
who had the might over whom, the right over whom.

' M. Thierry has written an ingenious Book, celebrating
with considerable pathos the fate of the Saxons, fallen under
that fierce-hearted Conquestor, Acquirer or Conqueror, as he
is named. M. Thierry professes to have a turn for looking
at that side of things : the fate of the Welsh too moves him ;
of the Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them
into the mountainous nooks of the West, whither they were
not worth following. Noble deeds, according to M. Thierry,
were done by these unsuccessful men, heroic suiferings
undergone ; which it is a pious duty to rescue from forget-
fulness. True, surely ! A tear at least is due to the un-
happy : it is right and fit that there should be a man to
assert that lost cause too, and see what can still be made ot
it. Most right : — and yet on the whole, taking matters on
that great scale, what can we say but tliat the cause which
pleased the gods has in the end pleased Cato also ? Cato
cannot alter it ; Cato will find that he cannot at bottom wish
to alter it. Might and Right do differ frightfully fi-om hour

NEW ERAS. 57

to hour ; but give them centuries to try it in, they are found
to be identical. Whose land was this of Britain ? God's
who made it, His and no other's it was and is. Who of
God's creatures had right to live in it ? The wolves and
bisons ? Yes they ; till one with a better right showed him-
self. The Celt, "aboriginal savage of Europe," as a snarl-
ing antiquary names him, arrived, pretending to have a
better right ; and did accordingly, not without pain to the
bisons, make good the same. He had a better right to that
piece of God's land ; namely a better might to turn it to
use ; — a might to settle himself there, at least, and try what
use he could turn it to. The bisons disappeared ; the Celts
took possession, and tilled. Forever, was it to be ? Alas,
Forever is not a category that can establish itself in this
world of Time. A world of Time, by the very definition of
it, is a world of mortality and mutability, of Beginning and
Ending. No property is eternal but God the Maker's :
whom Heaven permits to take possession, his is the right :
heaven's sanction is such permission, — while it lasts : nothing
more can be said. Why does that hyssop grow there, in the
chink of the wall ? Because the whole universe, sufficiently
occupied otherwise, could not hitherto prevent its growing !
It has the might and the right. By the same great law do
Roman Empires establish themselves, Christian Religions
promulgate themselves, and all extant Powers bear rule.
The strong thing is the just thing : this thou wilt find
throughout in our world ; — as indeed was God and Truth
the Maker of our world, or was Satan and Falsehood ?

' One proposition widely current as to this Norman Con-
quest is of a Physiologic sort: That the conquerors and con-
quered here were of different races ; nay that the Nobility
of England is still, to this hour, of a somewhat different
blood from the commonalty, their fine Norman features con-
trasting so pleasantly with the coarse Saxon ones of the
others. God knows, there are coarse enough features to be
seen among the commonalty of that country ; but if the No-
bility's be finer, it is not their Normanhood that can be the
reason. Does the above Physiologist reflect who those same

58 CHARTISM.

' Normans, Northmen, originally were ? Baltic Saxons, and
' what other miscellany of Lurdanes, Jutes and Deutsch Pi-
' rates from the East-sea marshes would join them in plunder

* of France ! If living three centuries longer in Heathenism,
' sea-robbery, and the unlucrative fishing of ambergris could
' ennoble them beyond the others, tlien were they ennobled.

* The Normans were Saxons who had learned to speak French.
^ No : by Thor and Wodan, the Saxons were all as noble as
^ was needful ; — shaped, says the My thus, " from the rock of
' the Harzgebirge ; " brother-tribes being made of claj^, wood,
' water, or what other material mighf be going ! A stubborn,

* taciturn, sulky, indomitable rock-made race of men ; as the
' figure they cut in all quarters, in the cane-brake of Arkansas,

* in the Ghauts of the Himmalayha, no less than in London

* City, in Warwick or Lancaster County, does still abun-
' dantly manifest.'

' To this English People in AVorld-History, there have
'been, shall I prophesy, Two grand tasks assigned? Huge-
' looming through the dim tumult of the always incommen-

* surable Present Time, outlines of two tasks disclose them-
' selves : the grand Lidustrial task of conquering some half

* or more of this Terraqueous Planet for. the use of man ; then

* secondly, the grand Constitutional task of sharing, in some
'pacific endurable manner, the fruit of said conquest, and

* showing all people how it might be done. These I will call
' their two tasks, discernible hitherto in World-Histoiy : in
' both of these they have made respectable though unequal
< progress. Steamengines, ploughshares, pickaxes ; what is
' meant by conquering this Planet, they partly know. Elec-
' tive franchise, ballot-box, representative assembly ; how to
' accomplish sharing of that conquest, they do not so well
' know. Europe knows not ; EuroiDC vehemently asks in these

* days, but receives no answer, no credible answer. For as to

* the partial Delolmish, Benthamee, or other French or Eng-
' lish answers, current in the j)rox3er quarters and highly

NEW ERAS.

59

* beneficial and indispensable there, tliy disbelief in them as
'final answers, I take it, is com^^lete.'

' Succession of rebellions ? Successive chppings away of
the Supreme Authority ; class after class rising in revolt to
say, "We will no more be governed so"? That is not the
history of the English Constitution ; not altogether that.
Rebellion is the means, but it is not the motive cause. The
motive cause, and true secret of the matter, were always
this : The necessity there w^as for rebelling ?

' Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere correcthj-aiii-
Ciliated mights. A dreadful business to articulate correctly !
Consider those Barons of Runnymead ; consider all manner
of successfully revolting men ! Your Great Charter has to
be experimented on, by battle and debate, for a hundred-
and-fifty years ; is then found to be correct ; and stands as
true Magna Charta, — nigh cut in pieces by a tailor, short of
measures, in later generations. Mights, I say, are a dread-
ful business to articulate correctly ! Yet articulated they
have to be ; the time comes for it, the need comes for it, and
w^ith enormous difficult}' and experimenting it is got done.
Call it not succession of rebellions ; call it rather succession
of expansions, of enlightenments, gift of articulate utterance
descending ever lower. Class after class acquires faculty of
utterance, — Necessity teaching and compelling ; as the dumb
youth seeing the knife at his father's throat, suddenly ac-
quired speech ! Consider too how class after class not only
acquires facult}' of articulating what its might is, but like-
wise grows in might, acquires might or loses might ; so that
always, after a space, there is not only new gift of articulat-
ing, but there is something new to articulate. Constitu-
tional epochs will never cease among men.'

* And so now, the Barons all settled and satisfied, a new
* class hitherto silent had begun to speak ; the Middle Class,

60 CHARTISM.

* namety. In the time of James First, not only Knights of the
' Shire but ParHamentary Burgesses assemble, to assert, to

* complain and propose ; a real House of Commons has come
' decisively into play, — much to the astonishment of James
' First. We call it a growth of mights, if also of necessities ;
' a growth of power to articulate mights, and make rights of
^ them.

' In those past silent centuries, among those silent classes,
much had been going on. Not only had red-deer in the New
and other Forests been got j)reserved and shot ; and treach-
eries of Simon de Montfort, wars of Red and White Roses,
Battles of Crecy, Battles of Bosworth and many other battles
been got transacted and adjusted ; but England wholly, not
without sore toil and aching bones to the millions of sires
and the millions of sons these eighteen generations, had beefn
got drained and tilled, covered with yellow harvests, beauti-
ful and rich possessions ; the mud-wooden Caesters and
Chesters had become steepled tile-roofed compact Towns.
Sheffield had taken to the manufacture of Sheffield whittles ;
Worstead could from wool spin yarn, and knit or weave the
same into stockings or breeches for men. England had
property valuable to the auctioneer ; but the accumulated
manufacturing, commercial, economic skill which lay impal-
pably warehoused in English hands and heads, what auction-
eer could estimate !

' Hardly an Englishman to be met with but could do some-
thing ; some cunninger thing than break his fellow-creature's
head with battle-axes. The seven incorporated trades, with
their million guild-brethren, with their hammers, their shut-
tles and tools, what an army ; — fit to conquer that land of
England, as we say, and to hold it conquered ! Nay, strangest
of all, the English people had acquired the faculty and habit
of thinking, — even of believing ; individual conscience had
unfolded itself among them ; Conscience, and Intelligence its
handmaid. Ideas of innumerable kinds were circulating
among these men : witness one. Shakspeare, a woolcomber,
poacher, or whatever else at Stratford in Warwickshire, who
happened to write books ! The finest human figure, as I ap-

JUBW ERAS. 61

prehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our
widely diffused Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt or Sar-
mat, I find no human soul so beautiful, these fifteen hundred
known years ; — our supreme modern European man. Him
England had contrived to realize ; were there not ideas?

' Ideas poetic and also Puritanic, — that had to seek utter-
ance in the notablest way ! England had got her Shaks]3eare ;
but was now about to get her IVIilton and Oliver Cromwell.
This too we will call a new expansion, hard as it might be to
articulate and adjust ; this, that a man could actually have
a Conscience for his own behoof, and not for his Priest's
only ; that his Priest, be w^ho he might, w^ould henceforth
have to take that fact along with him. One of the hardest
things to adjust ! It is not adjusted dow'n to this hour. It
lasts onwards to the time they call " Glorious Kevolution "
before so much as a reasonable truce can be made, and the
war proceed by logic mainty. And still it is war, and no
peace, unless we call waste vacancy peace. But it needed
to be adjusted, as the others had done, as still others will
do. Nobility at Runnymead cannot endure foul i:)lay growm
palpable ; no more can Gentry in Long Parliament ; no more
can Commonalty in Parhament they name Reformed.
Prynne's bloody ears were as a testimony and question to all
England: "Englishmen, is this fair?" England, no longer
continent of herself, answered, bellowing as with the voice
of Hons : " No, it is not fair ! " '

* But now on the Industrial side, while this great Constitu-

* tional controversy, and revolt of the Middle Class had not
' ended, had yet but begun, what a shoot was that that Eng-
' land, carelessly, in quest of other objects, struck out across
' the Ocean, into the waste land which it named New England !

* Hail to thee, poor little ship Mayflower, of Delft-Haven ;

* poor common-looking ship, hii'ed by common chai*ter party
' for coined dollars ; caulked with mere oakum and tar ; — pro-

* visioued with vulgarest biscuit and bacon ; — yet what ship

62 CHARTISM.

Argo, or miraculous epic ship built by the Sea-gods, was
other than a foolish bumbarge in comparison ! Golden
fleeces or the like these sailed for, with or without effect ;
thou little Mayflower hadst in thee a veritable Promethean
spark ; the life-spark of the largest Nation on our Earth, — so
we may already name the Transatlantic Saxon Nation. They
went seeking leave to hear sermon in their own method, these
Mayflower Puritans ; a most honest indispensable search :
and yet, like Saul the son of Kish, seeking a small thing, they
found this unexpected great thing! Honour to the brave
and true ; they verily, we say, carry fire from Heaven, and
have a power which themselves dream not of. Let all men
honour Puritanism, since God has so honoured it. Islam
itself, with its wild heartfelt '' Allah akbar, God is great," was
it not honoured ? There is but one thing without honour ;
smitten with eternal barrenness and inability to do or be :
Insincerity, Unbelief. He who believes no thing, who be-
lieves only the shows of things, is not in relation with Nature
and Fact at all. Nature denies him ; orders him at his earli-
est convenience to disaj^pear. Let him disappear from her
domains, — into those of Chaos, Hypothesis and Simulacrum,
or wherever else his parish may be.'

* As to the third Constitutional controversy, that of the

* Working Classes, which now debates itself everywhere these
' fifty years, in France specifically since 1789, in Ed gland too

* since 1831, it is doubtless the hardest of all to get articu-
' lated ; finis of peace, or even reasonable truce on this, is a
' thing I have little prospect of for several generations. Dark,
' wild-weltering, dreary, boundless ; nothing heard on it yet
' but ballot-boxes, Parliamentary arguing ; not to speak of

* much far worse arguing, by steel and lead, from Valm}^ to

* Waterloo, to Peterloo ! '

' And yet of Kepresentative Assemblies may not this good
' be said : That contending parties in a country do thereby

* ascertain one another's strength ? They fight there, since

NEW ERAS. C3

' fight they must, by petition, Parliamentary eloquence, not
' by sword, bayonet and bursts of military cannon. Why do
' men fight at all, if it be not that they are yet it^iacquainted
' with one another's strength, and must fight and ascertain
' it ? Knowing that thou art stronger than I, that thou canst
' compel me, I will submit to thee : unless I chance to pre-
' fer extermination, and shghtly circuitous suicide, there is no
' other course for me. That in England, by public meetings,

* by petitions, by elections, leading-articles, and other jang-

* ling hubbub and tongue-fence which perpetually goes on

* ever)'where in that country, people ascertain one another's
' strength, and the most obdurate House of Lords has to
' yield and give in before it come to cannonading and guil-
' lotinement ; this is a saving characteristic of England. Nay,
' at bottom, is not this the celebrated "English Constitution
'itself? This w/7spoken Constitution, whereof Privilege of
' Parliament, Money-Bill, Mutiny-Bill, and all that could bo
' spoken and enacted hitherto, is not the essence and body,
' but only the shape and skin ? Such Constitution is, in our
' times, verily invaluable.'

' Long stormy spring-time, w^et contentious April, winter
' chilling the lap of very May ; but at length the season of
' summer does come. So long the tree stood naked ; angry
' wiry naked boughs moaning and creaking in the wind : you
' would say, Cut it dow^n, why cumbereth it the ground ?

* Not so ; we must w^ait ; all things will have their time. — Of
' the man Shakspeare, and his Elizabethan Era, with its
' Sydneys, Raleighs, Bacons, what could we say ? — That it was

* a spiritual flower-time. Suddenly, as with the breath of

* June, 3"our rude naked tree is touched ; bursts into leaves

* and flowers, such leaves and flowers. The past long ages of

* nakedness, and wintr}" fermentation and elaboration, have
' done their part, though seeming to do nothing. The past

* silence has got a voice, all the more significant the longer it

* had continued silent. In trees, men, institutions, creeds,

64 CHARTISM.

nations, in all things extant and growing m this universe,
we may note such vicissitudes, and budding-times. More-
over there are spiritual budding-times ; and then also there
are physical appointed to nations.
* Thus in the middle of that poor calumniated Eighteenth
Century, see once more ! Long winter again past, the dead-
seeming tree proves to be living, to have been always living,
after motionless times, every bough shoots forth on the sud-
den, very strangely : — it now turns out that this favoured
England was not only to have had her Shakspeares, Bacons,
Sydneys, but to have her Watts, Arkwrights, Brindleys ! We
will honour greatness in all kinds. The Prospero evoked
the singing of Ariel, and took captive the world with those
melodies : the same Prospero can send his Eire-demons
panting across all oceans ; shooting with the speed of me-
teors, on cunning highways, from end to end of kingdoms ;
and make Iron his missionary, preaching its evangel to the
brute Primeval Powers, which listen and obey : neither is
this small. Manchester, with its cotton-fuz, its smoke and
dust, its tumult and contentious squalor, is hideous to thee ?
Think not so : a precious substance, beautiful as magic
dreams, and yet no dream but a reality, lies hidden in that
noisome wrapi^age ;— a wraj)page struggling indeed (look at
Chartisms and such like) to cast itself off, and leave the
beauty free and visible there ! Hast thou heard, with sound
ears, the awakening of a Manchester, on Monday morning, at
half past five by the clock ; the rushing off of its thousand
mills, like the broom of an Atlantic tide, ten thousand times
ten thousand spools and spindles all set humming there, — it
is perhaps, if thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagara, or
more so. Cotton-spinning is the clothing of the naked in
its result ; the triumph of man over matter in its means.
Soot and despair are not the essence of it ; they are divisible
from it, — at this hour, are they not crying fiercely to be
divided ? The great Goethe, looking at cotton Switzerland,
declared it, I am told, to be of all things that he had seen in
this world the most poetical. Whereat friend Kanzler von
Muller, in search, of the palpable picturesque, could not but

NEW ERAS. 65

stare wide-eyed. Nevertheless our 'World-Poet knew well
what he was saying.'

' Richard Arkwright, it would seem, was not a beautiful
man ; no romance-hero with haughty eyes, Apollo-lip, and
gesture like the herald Mercury ; a plain almost gross, bag-
cheeked, potbellied Lancashire man, with an air of painful
redection, yet also of copious free digestion ; — a man sta-
tioned by the community to shave certain dusty beards, in the
Northern parts of England, at a lialf-jDenny each. To such
end, we say, by forethought, oversight, accident and arrange-
ment, had Richard Ai'kwright been, by the community of
England and his own consent, set aj)art. Nevertheless, in
strajDping of razors, in lathering of dusty beards, and the
contradictions and confusions attendant thereon, the man
had notions in that rough head of his ; spindles, shuttles,
wheels and contrivances plying ideally within the same ;
rather hopeless-looking ; which, however, he did at last bring-
to bear. Not without difficulty. His townsfolk rose in mob
round him, for threatening to shorten labour, to shorten
wages ; so that he had to fly, with broken washpots, scat-
tered household, and seek refuge elsewhere. Nay his wife
too, as I learn, rebelled ; burnt his wooden model of his
spinning wheel ; resolute that he should stick to his razors
rather : for which, however, he decisively, as thou wilt rejoice
to understand, packed her out of doors. O reader, what a
Historical Phenomenon is that bag-cheeked, potbellied, much
enduring, much-inventing man and barber ? French Revo-
lutions were a-brewing : to resist the same in any measure,
imperial Kaisers were impotent without the cotton and cloth
of England : and it was this man that had to give England
the power of cotton.'

* Neither had Watt of the Steam engine a heroic origin, any
kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this
world were shooting their partridges ; noisily, in Parliament
or elsewhere, solving the question. Head or tail ? while this
man, w^ith blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching
out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret ; or, having found it,
was painfully wending to and fro in quest of a " monied

66 CHARTISM.

' man " as indispensable man-midwife of the same. Eeader,

* thou shalt admire what is admirable, not what is dressed m
' admirable. Thou shalt learn to know the British lion even
' when he is not throne-supporter, and also the British jack-

* ass in lion's skin even when he is. Ah, couldst thou alwaj's,
' what a world were it ! But has the Berlin Royal Academy
' or any English Useful- Knowledge Society discovered, for in-
' stance, who it was that first scratched earth with a stick ; and
' threw corns, the biggest he could find, into it ; seedgrains of
' a certain grass, which he named white or wheat f Again, what
' is the whole Tees-water and other breeding world to him who
' stole home from the forests the first bison-calf, and bred it
' up to be a tame bison, a milk-cow ? No machine of all they

* showed me in Birmingham can be put in comparison for in-
' genuity with that figure of the wedge named knife, of the
'wedges named saw, of the lever named hammer: — nay is it

* not with the hammer-knife, named sword, that men fight, and

* maintain any semblance of constituted authority that yet

* survives among us ? The steamengine I call fire-demon and

* great ; but it is nothing to the invention of fire. Prome-

* theus, Tubal-cain, Triptolemus ! Are not our greatest men

* as good as lost ? The men that walk daily among us, cloth-

* ing us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness,
' mere mythic men.

' It is said, ideas produce revolutions : and truly so ihey do ;

* not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical. In this clang-
' ing clashing universal Sword-dance which the Euroj)ean
' world now dances for the last half-century, Voltaire is but
^ one choragus, where Richard Arkwright is another. Let it
'dance itself out. When Arkwright shall have become
' mythic like Arachne, we shall spin in peaceable profit by
' him ; and the Sword-dance, with all its sorrowful shufilings,
' "Waterloo waltzes, Moscow gallopades, how forgotten will
'that be!'

' On the whole, were not all these things most unexpected,
' unforeseen ? As indeed what thing is foreseen ; especially
'what man, the parent of things ! Robert Clive in that same

NEW ERAS. ■ 67

'time went out, with a developed gift of penmanship, as
'writer or superior book-keeper to a Trading Factory estab-
' Hshed in the distant East. With gift of penmanship devel-
' oped ; with other gifts not yet developed, which the calls of
' the case did by and by develope. Not fit for book-keeping

* alone, the man was found fit for conquering Nawaubs, found-
' ing kingdoms, Indian Empires ! In a questionable manner,
' Indian Empire from the other hemisphere took up its abode
' in Leadenhall Street, in the City of London.

' Accidental all these things and persons look, unexpected
'every one of them to man. Yet inevitable every one of
' them ; foreseen, not unexpected, by Supreme Power ; pre-
'j)ared, appointed from afar. Advancing always through all
'centuries, in the middle of the eighteenth they arrived.
' The Saxon kindred burst forth into cotton-spinning, cloth-

* cropping, iron-forging, steam-engining, railwaying, commerc-
' ing and careering towards all the winds of Heaven, — in this
' inexplicable noisy manner ; the noise of which, in Power-
' mills, in progress-of-the-species Magazines, still deafens us
' somewhat. Most nois}^ sudden ! The Staffordshire coal-
' stratum and coal-strata, lay side by side with iron-strata,
' quiet since the creation of the world ! Water flowed in
' Lancashire and Lanarkshire ; bituminous fire lay bedded in
' rocks there too, — over which how many fighting Stanleys,
' black Douglases, and other the like contentious persons, had
' fought out their bickerings and broils, not without result,
' v/e will hope ! But God said. Let the iron missionaries be ;
'and they were. Coal and iron, so long close unregardful
' neighbours, are wedded together ; Birmingham and Wol-
' verhampton, and the hundred Stygian forges, with their fire-
' throats and never-resting sledge-hammers, rose into day.
' "Wet Mancunium stretched out her hand towards CaroUna
' and the torrid zone, and plucked cotton there : who could
' forbid her, her that had the skill to weave it ? Fish fled
' thereupon from the Mersey River, vexed with innumerable
' keels. England, I say, dug out her bitumen-fire, and bade
' it work : towns rose, and steeple-chimneys ; — Chartisms
' also, and Parliaments they name Reformed.'

68 CHARTISM.

Suchi figuratively given, are some prominent points, chief
mountain-summits, of our English history past and present,
according to the Author of this strange untranslated "Work,
whom we think we recognise to be an old acquaintance.

CHAPTER IX.

PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM.

To US looking at these matters somewhat in the same light,
Reform-Bills, French Revolutions, Louis-Philippe s. Chartisms,
Revolts of Three Days, and what not, are no longer inexpli-
cable. Where the great mass of men is tolerably right, all is
right ; where they are not right, all is wrong. The speaking
classes speak and debate, each for itself ; the great dumb,
deep-buried class lies like an Enceladus, who in his pain, if he
will complain of it, has to produce earthquakes ! Everywhere,
in these countries, in these times, the central fact worthy of all
consideration forces itself on us in this shape : the claim of
the Free Working man to be raised to a level, we may sa}^,
with the Working Slave, his anger and cureless discontent
till that be done. Food, shelter, due guidance, in return for
his labour : candidly interpreted. Chartism and all such isms
mean that ; and the madder they are, do they not the more
emphatically mean, "See what guidance jon. have given us !
What delirium we are brought to talk and project, guided by
nobody ! " Laissez-faire on the part of the Governing Classes,
we repeat again and again, will, with whatever difficulty,- have
to cease ; pacific mutual division of the spoil, and a world
well let alone, will no longer suffice. A Do-nothing Guid-
ance ; and it is a Do-something World ! Would to God our
Ducal Duces would become leaders indeed ; our Aristocracies
and Priesthoods discover in some suitable degree what the
world expected of them, what the world could no longer do
without o'ettinix of them ! Nameless unmeasured confusions,
misery to themselves and us, might so be spared. But that
too will be as God has appointed. If they learn, it will be
well and happy : if not they, then others instead of them will

PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM. 69

and must, and once more, though after a long sad circuit, it
^vill be well and happy.

Neither is the history of Chartism m^'sterious in these
times ; esi^ecially if that of Radicalism be looked at. All
along for the last five-and-twenty years, it was curious to
note how the internal discontent of Enoiand struo-oied to find
vent for itself through any orifice : the poor patient all sick
from centre to surface, complains now of this member, now of
that ; — corn-law^s, currency-laws, free-trade, protection, want
of free-trade : the poor patient tossing from side to side,
seeking a sound side to lie on, finds 'none. This Doctor says,
it is the liver ; that other, it is the lungs, the head, the heart,
defective transpiration in the skin. A thorough-going Doctor
of eminence said, it was rotten boroughs ; the want of ex-
tended suffrage to destroy rotten boroughs. From of old
the English j)atient himself had a continually recurring
notion that this was it. The English people are used to suf-
frage ; it is their panacea for all that goes wrong with them ;
they have a fixed-idea of suffrage. Singular enough ; oue*s
right to vote for a Member of Parliament, to send one's
* twenty thousandth part of a master of tongue-fence to
National Palaver,' — the Doctors asserted that this was Free-
dom, this and no other. It seemed credible to many men,
of high degree and of low. The persuasion of remedy grew,
the evil was pressing ; Swing's ricks were on fire. Some nine
years ago, a State-surgeon rose, and in peculiar circumstances
said : Let there be extension of the suffrage ; let the great
Doctor's nostrum, the patient's old 2:)assionate prayer be
fuhilled !

Parliamentary Radicalism, while it gave articulate utterance
to the discontent of the English people, could not by its
worst enemy be said to be without a function. If it is in the
natural order of things that thei'e must be discontent, no less
so is it that such discontent should have an outlet, a Parlia-
mentary voice. Here the matter is debated of, demonstrated,
contradicted, qualified, reduced to feasibility ; — can at least
solace itself with hope, and die gently, convicted of ?<?ifeasi-
bility. The New, Untried ascertains how it will fit itself into

TO CHARTIS3I

the arrangements of the Old ; whether the Old can be com'
j^elled to admit it ; how in that case it ma}', with the minimum
of violence, be admitted. Nor let us count it an easy one,
this function of Radicalism ; it was one of the most dilficult.
The pain-stricken patient does, indeed, without effort groan
and complain ; but not without effort does the physician as-
certain what it is that has gone wrong with him, how some
remedy may be devised for him. And above all, if your pa-
tient is not one sick man, but a whole sick nation ! Dingy
dumb millions, grimed with dust and sweat, witli darkness,
rage and sorrow, stood round these men, saying, or struggling
as they could to say : "Behold, our lot is unfair ; our life is
not whole but sick : we cannot live under injustice ; go ye and
get us justice ! " For whether the poor operative clamoured
for Time-bill, Factory-bill, Corn-bill, for or against whatever
l.ill, this was what he meant. All bills plausibly presented
might have some look of hope in them, might get some
clamour of approval from him ; as, for the man wholly sick,
there is no disease in the Nosology but he can trace in him-
self some symptoms of it. Such was the mission of Parlia-
mentary Radicalism.

How ParHamentary Radicalism has fulfilled this mission,
entrusted to its management these eight years now, is known
to all men. The expectant millions have sat at a feast of the
Barmecide ; been bidden fill themselves with imagination of
meat. What thing has Radicalism obtained for them ; what
other than shadows of things has it so much as asked for
them ? Cheap Justice, Justice to Ireland, Irish Appropriation-
Clause, Rate-paying Clause, Poor-Rate, Church-Rate, House-
hold Suffrage, Ballot-Question ' open ' or shut : not things but
shadows of things ; Benthamee formulas ; barren as the east-
wind ! An Ultra-radical, not seemingly of the Benthamee
species, is forced to exclaim : * The people are at last wearied.
' They say. Why should we be ruined in our shops, thrown
' out of our farms, voting for these men ? Ministerial major-
' ities decline ; this Ministry has become impotent, had it
' even the will to do good. They have called long to us,
' "We are a Reform Ministry ; will ye not support us? " We

PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM. 71

* have sui^ported them ; borne them forward indignantly on
' our shoulders, time after time, fall after fall, when they had
' been hurled out into the street ; and lay prostrate, helpless,
' like dead luggage. It is the fact of a Reform Ministry, not
' the name of one that we would support ! Languor, sickness
' of hope deferred pervades the public mind ; the public
' mind says at last, Why all this struggle for the name of a
' Reform Ministry ? Let the Tories be Ministry if they will ;

* let at least some living reality be Ministry ! A rearing horse
' that will only run backward, he is not the horse one would
' choose to travel on : yet of all conceivable horses the worst

* is the dead horse. Mounted on a rearing horse, you may
' back him, spur him, check him, make a little w^ay even back-
' wards ; but seated astride of your dead horse, what chance
' is there for you in the chapter of possibilities ? You sit
' motionless, hopeless, a spectacle to gods and men.'

There is a class of revolutionists named Girondins, whose
fate in history is remarkable enough ! Men who rebel, and
urge the Lower Classes to rebel, ought to have other than
Formulas to go upon. Men wdio discern in the misery of the
toiling complaining millions not miserj^ but only a raw-mate-
rial which can be wrought upon, and traded in, for one's own
poor hidebound theories and egoisms ; to whom millions of
living fellow-creatures, with beating hearts in their bosoms,
beating, suffering, hoping, are 'masses,' mere * explosive
masses for blowing down Bastilles with,' for voting at hust-
ings for i4K ; such men are of the questionable species ! No
man is justified in resisting by word or deed the Authority he
lives under, for a light cause, be such Authority what it may.
Obedience, httle as many may consider that side of the mat-
ter, is the primary duty of man. No man but is bound in-
defeasibly, with all force of obligation, to obey. Parents,
teachers, superiors, leaders, these all creatures recognise as
deserving obedience. Recognised or not recognised, a man
has his superiors, a regular hierarchy above him ; extending
up, degree above degree ; to Heaven itself and God the
Maker, who made His world not for anarchy but for rule and
order ! It is not a light matter when the just man can recog-

72 CHARTISM'.

nise in the powers set over him no longer anything that is di-
vine ; when resistance against such becomes a deeper law of
order than obedience to them ; when the just man sees himself
in the tragical position of a stirrer nj) of strife ! Rebel with-
out due and most due cause, is the ugliest of words ; the first
rebel was Satan.

But now in these circumstances shall we blame the unvot-
ing disappointed millions that they turn away with horror
from this name of a Reform Ministry, name of a Parliamentary
Radicalism, and demand a fact and reality thereof? That
they too, having still faith in what so many had faith in, still
count ' extension of the suffrage ' the one thing needful ; and
say, in such manner as they can. Let the suffrage be still ex-
tended, then all will be well ? It is the ancient British faith ;
promulgated in these ages by prophets and evangelists ;
preached forth from barrel-heads by all manner of men. He
who is free and blessed has his twenty-thousandth part of a
master of tongue-fence in National Palaver ; whosoever is not
blessed but unhappy, the ailment of him is that he has it not.
Ought he not to have it then ? By the law of God and of
men. Yea ; — and will have it withal ! Chartism, with its * five
points,' born aloft on pikelieads and torchlight meetings, is
there. Chartism is one of the most natural phenomena in
England. Not that Chartism now exists should provoke won-
der ; but that the invited hungry people should have sat eight
years at such table of the Barmecide, patiently expecting
somewhat from the Name of a Reform Ministry, and not till
after eight years have grown hopeless, this is the respectable
side of the miracle.

CHAPTER X.

IMPOSSIBLE.

"But what are we to do? " exclaims the practical man, im-
patiently on every side •.•"Descend from speculation and the
safe pulpit, down into the rough market-place, and say what
can be done ! " — O practical man, there seem very many things

IMPOSSIBLE. 73

which practice and true manlike effort, in ParHament and out
of it, might actually avail to do. But the first of all things,
as already said, is to gii'd thyself up for actual doing ; to know
that thou actually either must do, or, as the Irish say, ' come
out of that.'

It is not a lucky word this same impossible : no good comes
of those that have it so often in their mouth. Who is he
that says always. There is a lion in the way ? Sluggard, thou
must slay the lion, then ; the way has to be travelled ! In
Art, in Practice, innumerable critics will demonstrate that
most things are henceforth impossible ; that we are got, once
for all, into the region of perennial commonplace, and must
contentedly continue there. Let such critics demonstrate ;
it is the natui'e of them : what harm is in it ? Poetry once
well demonstrated to be impossible, arises the Burns, arises
the Goethe. Unheroic commonplace being now clearly aU
we have to look for, comes the Napoleon, comes the conquest
of the world. It was proved by fluxionary calculus, that
steamships could never get across from the farthest point of
Ireland to the nearest of Newfoundland : impelling force, re-
sisting force, maximum here, minimum there ; by law of Na-
ture, and geometric demonstration ; — what could be done ?
The Great Western, could weigh anchor from Bristol Port ;
that could be done. The Great Western, bounding safe
through the gullets of the Hudson, threw her cable out on
the capstan of New York, and left our still moist paper-dem-
onstration to diy itself at leisure. "Impossible?" cried
Mirabeau to his secretaiy, " Ne me dites jamais ce htte de mot.
Never name to me that blockhead of a word ! "

There is a phenomenon which one might call Paralytic
Radicahsm, in these days ; which gauges with Statistic meas-
uring-reed, sounds with Philosophic Politico-Economic plum-
met the deep dark sea of troubles ; and having taught us
rightly what an infinite sea of troubles it is, sums up with the
practical inference, and use of consolation, That nothing what-
ever can be done in it by man, who has simply to sit still, and
look wistfully to * time and general laws ; ' and thereupon
without so much as recommending suicide, coldly takes its

74 CHARTISM.

leave of us. Most paralytic, uninstructive ; unproductive of
any comfort to one ! They are an unreasonable class who cry,
"Peace, jDcace," when there is no peace. But what kind of
class are they who cry, "Peace, peace, have I not told you that
there is no peace ! " Paralytic Radicalism, frequent among
those Statistic friends of ours, is one of the most afflictive phe-
nomena the mind of men can be called to contemplate. One
prays that it at least might cease. Let Paralysis retire into
secret places, and dormitories proper for it ; the public high-
ways ought not to be occupied by peo^^le demonstrating that
motion is impossible. Paralytic ; — and also, thank Heaven,
entirely false ! Listen to a thinker of another sort : ' All evil, ,
' and this evil too, is as a nightmare ; the instant you begin
' to sti7' under it, the evil is properly speaking gone.' Consider,
O reader, whether it be not actually so ? Evil, once manfully
fronted, ceases to be evil ; there is generous battle-hope in
place of dead passive misery ; the evil itself has become a kind
of good.

To the practical man, therefore, we will repeat that he has,
as the first thing he can 'do,' to gird himself up for actual
doing ; to know well that he is either there to do, or not
there at all. Once rightly girded up, how many things will
present themselves as doable which now are not attemptible !
Two things, great things dwell for the last ten years, in all
thinking heads in England ; and are hovering, of late, even
on the tongues of not a few. With a word on each of these,
we will dismiss the practical man, and right gladly take our-
selves into obscurity and silence again. Universal Education
is the first great thing we mean ; general Emigration is the
second.

Who would sup230se that Education were a thing which had
to be advocated on the ground of local expediency, or indeed
on any ground ? As if it stood not on the basis of everlasting
duty, as a prime necessity of man. It is a thing that should
need no advocating ; much as it does actually need. To im-
part the gift of thinking to those who cannot think, and yet
who could in that case think : this, one would imagine, was
the first function a government had to set about discharging.

IMPOSSIBLE. 75

Were it not a cruel thing* to see, in any province of an empire,
the inhabitants hving all mutilated in their limbs, each strong
man with his right arm lamed ? How much crueller to find
the strong soul, with its eyes still sealed, its eyes extinct so
that it sees not ! Light has come into the world, but to this
poor peasant it has come in vain. For six thousand years the
Sons of Adam, in sleepless effort, have been devising, doing,
discovering; in mysterious infinite indissoluble communion,
wanting, a little band of brothers, against -the great black em-
pire of Necessity and Night ; they have accomplished such a
conquest and conquests : and to this man it is all as if it had
not been. The four-and-twenty letters of the Alphabet are
still Runic enigmas to him. He passes by on the other side ;
and that great Spiritual Kingdom, the toil won conquest of his
own brothers, all that his brothers have conquered, is a thing
non-extant for him. An invisible empire ; he knows it not,
suspects it not. And is it not his withal ; the conquest of his
own brothers, the lawfully acquired possession of all men ?
Baleful enchantment lies over him, from generation to genera-
tion ; he knows not that such an empire is his, that such an
empire is at all. Oh, what are bills of rights, emancipations
of black slaves into black apprentices, lawsuits in chancery for
some short usufruct of a bit of land? The grand 'seedfield
of Time ' is this man's, and you give it him not. Time's seed-
field, which includes the Earth and all her seedfields and
pearl-oceans, nay her sowers too and pearl divers, all that was
wise and heroic and victorious here below ; of which the
Earth's centuries are but as furrows, for it stretches forth from
the Beginning onward even into this Day !

' My inheritance, liow lordly wide and fair ;
Time is my fair seedfield, to Time I'm heir ! '

Heavier wrong is not done under the sun. It lasts from year
to year, from centuiw to century ; the blinded sire slaves him-
self out, and leaves a blinded son ; and men, made in the
image of God, continue "as two-legged beasts of labour ; — and
in the largest empire of the world, it is a debate whether a.

76 CHARTISM.

small fraction of the Eevenue of one Day (30,000?. is but that)
shall, after Thirteen Centuries, be laid out on it, or not laid
out on it. Have we Governors, have we Teachers ; have we
had a Church these thirteen hundred years? What is an
Overseer of souls, an Arch-overseer, Archiepiscopus ? Is he
something ? If so, let him lay his hand on his heart, and say
what thing !

But quitting all that, of which the human soul cannot well
speak in terms of civihty, let us observe now that Education,
is not only an eternal duty, but has at length become even a
temporaiy and ephemeral one, which the necessities of the
hour will obhge us to look after. These Twenty-four million
labouiing men, if their affan-s remain unregulated, chaotic,
will burn ricks and mills ; reduce us, themselves and the
world into ashes and ruin. Simply their affairs cannot remain
unregulated, chaotic ; but must be regulated, brought into
some kind of order. "What intellect were able to resfulate
them? The intellect of a Bacon, the energy of a Luther, if
left to their own strength, might pause in dismay before such
a task ; a Bacon and Luther added together, to be pei'petual
prime minister over us, could not do it. No one great and
greatest intellect can do it. WTiat can ? Only Twenty-four
million ordinary intellects, once awakened into action ; these,
well presided over, may. Intellect, insight, is the discern-
ment of order in disorder ; it is the discovery of the will of
Nature, of God's will ; the beginning of the capability to walk
according to that. With perfect intellect, were such possible
without perfect morality, the world would be perfect ; its
efforts unerringly correct, its results continually successful,
its condition faultless. Intellect is like light ; the Chaos be-
comes a World under it : fiat lux. These Twenty-four million
intellects are but common intellects ; but they are intellects ;
in earnest about the matter, instructed each about his own
province of it ; labouring each perpetually, with what partial
light can be attained, to bring such province into rationality.
From the partial determinations and their conflict, spiings
the imiversal. Precisely what quantity of intellect was in the
Twenty-four millions will be exhibited by the result they

IMPOSSIBLE. 77

arrive at ; that quantity and no more. According as tliere
was intellect or no intellect in the individuals, will the general
conclusion they make out embody itself as a world-healing
Truth and Wisdom, or as a baseless fateful Hallucination, a
Chimsera breathing not fabulous fire !

Dissenters call for one scheme of Education, the Church
objects ; this j)arty objects, and that ; there is endless objec-
tion, by him and by her and by it : a subject encumbered
with difficulties on every side ? Pity that difficulties exist ;
that Eeligion, of all things, should occasion difficulties. We
do not extenuate them : in their reality they are considerable ;
in their apjDearance and pretension, they are insuperable,
heart-appalling to all Secretaries of the Home Dej)artment.
For, in very truth, how can Religion be divorced from Educa-
tion ? An irreverent knowledge is no knowledge ; may be a
development of the logical or other handicraft faculty inward
or outward ; but is no culture of the soul of a man. A
knowledge that ends in barren self-worship, comparative in-
difierence or contempt for all God's Universe except one insig-
nfficant item thereof, what is it ? Handicraft develoj^ment,
and even shallow as handicraft. Nevertheless is handicraft
itself, and the habit of the merest logic, nothing ? It is al-
ready something ; it is the indispensable beginning of every
thing ! Wise men know it to be an indisj)ensable something ;
not yet much ; and would so gladly superadd to it the ele-
ment whereby it may become all. Wise men would not
quarrel in attempting this ; they would lovingly co-operate in
attempting it.

' And now how teach religion ? ' so asks the indignant Ultra-
radical, cited above ; an Ultra-radical seemingly not of the
Benthamee species, with whom, though his dialect is far dif-
ferent, there are sound churchmen, we hope, who have some
fellow-feeling: 'How teach religion? By plying with litur-
' gies, catechisms, credos ; droning thirty-nine or other arti-
' cles incessantly into the infant ear ? Friends ! In that case,
' why not apply to Birmingham, and have Machines made,
' and set up at all street-corners, in highways and byways, to
' repeat and vociferate the same, not ceasing night or day ?

78 CHARTISM.

' The genius of Birmingham is adequate to that. Albertug
' Magnus had a leather man that could articulate ; not to speak
' of Martinus Scriblerus's Niirnberg man that could reason as

* well as we know who ! Depend upon it, Birmingham can
' make machines to repeat liturgies and articles ; to do what-

* soever feat is mechanical. And what were all schoolmasters,
' nay all priests and churches compared with this Birmingham
' Iron Church ! Votes of two millions in aid of the church

* were then something. You order, at so many pounds a-head,

* so many thousand iron parsons as your grant covers ; and
' fix them by satisfactory masonry in all quarters wheresoever

* wanted, to preach there independent of the world. In loud

* thoroughfares, still more in unawakened districts, troubled
' with argumentative infidelity, you make the windpipes wider,
' strengthen the main steam-cylinder ; your parson preaches,
' to the due pitch, while you give him coal ; and fears no man
'or thing. Here loere a "Church-extension;" to which I,
' with my last penny, did I believe in it, could subscribe.

* Ye blind leaders of the blind ! Are we Calmucks, that pray
' by turning of a rotatory calebash with written prayers in it ?
' Is Mammon and machinery the means of converting human
' souls, as of spinning cotton ? Is God, as Jean Paul predicted
' it would be, become verily a Force ; the J^ther too a Gas !
' Alas, that Atheism should have got the length of putting on
' priests' vestments, and penetrating into the sanctuary itself!
' Can dronings of articles, repetitions of liturgies, and all the
' cash and contrivance of Birmingham and the Bank of Eng-
' land united bring ethereal fire into a human soul, quicken it
'out of earthly darkness into heavenly wisdom? Soul is
'kindled only by soul. To "teach" religion, the first thing
' needful, and also the last and the only thing, is finding of a
' man who has religion. All else follows from this, church-
' building, church-extension, whatever else is needful follows ;
' without this nothing will follow.'

From which w^e, for our part, conclude that the method of
teaching religion to the English peojjle is still far behindhand ;
that the wise and pious may well ask themselves in silence
wistfully, " How is that last priceless element, by which educa-

IMPOSSIBLE. 79

tion becomes perfect, to be superadded?" and the unwise
who think themselves pious, answering aloud, " By this
method, By that method," long argue of it to small purpose.

But now, in the mean time, could not by some fit official
person, some fit announcement be made, in words well-weighed,
in plan well-schemed, adequately representing the facts of. the
thing, that after thirteen centuries of waiting, he the official
person, and England with him, was minded now to have the
mysteiy of the Alphabetic Letters imparted to all human
souls in this realm? Teaching of religion was a thing he
could not undertake to settle this day ; it would be work for
a day after this ; the work of this day was teaching of the al-
phabet to all people. The miraculous art of reading and
wi'iting, such seemed to him the needful preliminaiy of all teach-
ing, the first corner-stone of what foundation soever could be
laid for what edifice soever, in the teaching kind. Let pious
Cburchism make haste, let pious Dissenterism make haste,
let all pious preachers and missionaries make haste, bestir
themselves according to their zeal and skill : he the offi-
cial person stood up for the Alphabet ; and was even im-
patient for it, having waited thirteen centuries now. He in-
sisted, and would take no denial, postponement, promise,
excuse, or subterfuge. That all English persons should be
taught to read. He appealed to all rational Englishmen, of
all creeds, classes and colours, "Wliether this was not a fair
demand ; nay whether it was not an indispensable one in
these days. Swing and Chartism having risen ? For a choice
of inoffensive Hornbooks, and Schoolmasters able to teach
reading, he tinisted the mere secular sagacity of a National
Collective Wisdom, in proper committee, might be found suf-
ficient. He purposed to appoint such Schoolmasters, to ven-
ture on the choice of such Hornbooks ; to send a School-
master and Hornbook into every township, parish and hamlet
of England ; so that, in ten years hence, an Enghshman who
could not read might be acknowledged as the monster, which
he really is !

This official person's plan we do not give. The thing lies
there, with the facts of it, and with the appearances or sham-

80 CHARTISM.

facts of it ; a plan adequately representing the facts of the
thing could by human energy be struck out, does lie there for
discovery and striking out. It is his, the official person's
duty, not ours, to mature a plan. We can believe that Church-
ism and Dissenterism would clamour aloud ; but yet that in
the mere secular Wisdom of Parliament a perspicacity equal
to the choice of Hornbooks might, in very deed, be found to
reside. England we believe would, if consulted, resolve to
that effect. Alas, grants of a half-day's revenue once in the
thirteen centuries for such an object, do not call out the voice
of England, only the superficial clamour of England ! Horn-
books unexceptionable to the candid portion of England, we
will believe, might be selected. Nay, we can conceive that
Schoolmasters fit to teach reading might, by a board of ra-
tional men, whether fi'om Oxford or Hoxton, or from both or
neither of these places, be pitched upon. We can conceive
even, as in Prussia, that a penalty, civil disabilities, that pen-
alties and disabilities till they were found effectual, might be
by law inflicted on every parent who did not teach his children
to read, on every man who had not been taught to read. We
can conceive in fine, such is the vigour of our imagination,
there might be found in England, at a dead-lift, strength
enough to perform this miracle, and produce it henceforth as
a miracle done : the teaching of England to read ! Harder
things, we do know, have been performed by nations before
now, not abler-looking than England. Ah me ! if, by some
beneficent chance, there should be an official man found in
England who could and would, with deliberate courage, after
ripe counsel, with candid insight, with patience, practical
sense, knowing realities to be real, knowing clamours to be
clamorous and to seem real, propose this thing, and the in-
numerable tilings springing from it, — wo to any Churchism
or any Dissenterism that cast itself athwart the path of that
man ! Avaunt ye gainsayers ! is darkness, and ignorance of the
Alphabet necessary for you ? Reconcile yourselves to the Al-
phabet, or depart elsewhither ! — Would not all that has gen-
uineness in England gradually rally round such a man ; all
that has strength in England ? For realities alone have

IMPOSSIBLE. 81

strength ; wind-bags are wind ; cant is cant, leave it alone
there. Nor are all clamours momentous : among living
creatures, we find, the loudest is the longest-eared ; among life-
less things the loudest is the di-um, the emptiest. Alas, that
official persons, and all of us, had but eyes to see what was
real, what was merely chimerical, and thought or called itself
real ! How many dread minatory Castle-spectres should we
leave there, with their admonishing right-hand and ghastly-
burning saucer-eyes, to do simply whatsoever they might find
themselves able to do ! Alas, that we were but real ourselves ;
we should then have surer vision for the real. Castle-spectres,
in their utmost terror, ai'e but poor mimicries of that real and
most real terror which lies in the Life of every Man : that,
thou coward, is the thing to be Mraid of, if thou wilt live in
fear. It is but the scratch of a bare bodkin ; it is but the
flight of a few days of time ; and even thou, poor palpitating
featherbrain, wilt find how real it is. Eternity : hast thou
heard of that ? Is that a fact, or is it no fact? Are Bucking-
ham House and St Stephens in that, or not in that ?

But now we have to speak of the second gi'eat thing : Emi-
gration. It was said above, aU new epochs, so convulsed and
tumultuous to look upon, are ' expansions,' increase of faculty
not yet organised. It is eminently true of the confusions of
this time of ours. Disorganic Manchester afflicts us with its
Chartisms ; yet is not spinning of clothes for the naked in-
trinsically a most blessed thing ? Manchester once organic will
bless and not afflict. The confusions, if we would understand
them, are at bottom mere increase which we know not yet
how to manage ; ' new wealth which the old coffers will not
hold.' How true is this, above all, of the strange phenome-
non called ' over- population ! ' Over-population is the grand
anomaly, which is bringing all other anomalies to a crisis.
Now once more, as at the end of the Roman Empii-e, a most
confused epoch and yet one of the greatest, the Teutonic Coun-
tries find themselves too full. On a certain western rim of
our small Europe, there are more men than were expected.
Heaped up against the western shore there, and for a couple

82 * CHARTISM.

of hundred miles inward, the * tide of population ' swells too
high, and confuses itself somewhat ! Over-population ? And
yet, if this small western rim of Europe is overpeopled, does
not everywhere else a whole vacant Earth, as it were, call to
us. Come and till me, come and reap me ! Can it be an evil
that in an Earth such as ours there should be new Men?
Considered as mercantile commodities, as working machines,
is there in Birmingham or out of it a machine of such value ?

* Good Heavens ! a white European Man, standing on his two
' legs, with his two five-fingered Hands at his shackle-bones,
' and miraculous Head on his shoulders, is wortli something

* considerable, one would say ! ' The stupid black African
man brings money in the market ; the much stupider four-
footed horse brings money: — it is we that have not yet
learned the art of managing our white European man !

The controversies on Malthus and the 'Population Prin-
ciple,' * Preventive Check ' and so forth, with which the public
ear has been deafened for a long while, are indeed sufficiently
mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world
or the next, is all that of the preventive check and the denial
of the preventive check. Anti-Malthusians quoting their Bible
against palpable facts, are not a pleasant spectacle. On the
other hand, how often have we read in Malthusian benefactors
of the species : ' The working people have their condition in
' their own hands : let them diminish the supply of labourers,
*and of course the demand and the remuneration will increase ! '
Yes, let them diminish the supply : but who are they ? They
are twenty-four millions of human individuals, scattered over
a hundred and eighteen thousand square miles of space and
more ; weaving, delving, hammering, joinering ; each unknown
to his neighbour ; each distinct within his own skin. They
are not a kind of character that can take a resolution, and act
on it, very readily. Smart Sally in our alley proves ail-too
fascinating to brisk Tom in yours : can Tom be called on to
make pause, and calculate the demand for labour in the Brit-
ish Empire first ? Nay, if Tom did renounce his highest bless-
edness of life, and struggle and conquer like a Saint Francis
of Assisi, what would it profit him or us ? Seven millions of

IMPOSSIBLE. 83

the finest peasantiy do not renounce, but proceed all the more
briskly ; and with blue-visaged Hibernians instead of fair
Saxon Tomsons, and Sallysons, the latter end of that country
is worse than the beginning. O wonderful Malthusian proph-
ets ! Millenniums are undoubtedly coming, must come one
way or the other : but will it be, think you, by twenty mil-
lions of working people simultaneously striking work in that
department ; jpassing, in universal trades-union, a resolution
not to beget any more till the labour-market becomes satisfac-
tory ? By Day and Night ! they were indeed iiTesistibly so ;
not to be compelled by law or war ; might make their own
terms with the richer classes, and defy the world !

A shade more rational is that of those other benefactors of
the species, who counsel that in each parish, in some central
locality, instead of the Parish Clergyman, there might be es-
tabhshed some Parish Exterminator ; or say a Reservoir of
Arsenic, kept up at the pubHc expense, fi'ee to all i)arishioners ;
for lohich Church the rates probably would not be grudged. —
Ah, it is bitter jesting on such a subject. One's heart is sick
to look at the di-eary chaos, and valley of Jehosaphat, scattered
with the limbs and souls of one's fellow-men ; and no divine
voice, only creaking of hungry vultui-es, inai'ticulate bodeful
ravens, horn-eyed parrots that do articulate, proclaiming. Let
these bones live ! — Dante's Divina Commedia is called the
mournfullest of books : transcendant mistemper of the no-
blest soul ; utterance of a boundless, godlike, unsjDeakable,
implacable sorrow and protest against the world. But in
Holywell Street, not long ago, we bought, for three-pence, a
book still mournfuUer : the Pamphlet of one "Marcus," whom
his poor Chartist editor and repubhsher calls the "Demon
Author." This Marcus Pamphlet was the book alluded to by
Stephens the Preacher Chartist, in one of his harangues : it
proves to be no fable that such a book existed ; here it lies,
' Printed by John Hill, Black-horse Court, Fleet Street, and
' now reprinted for the instruction of the labourer, by WiU^
'iam Dugdale, Holywell Street, Strand,' the exasperated Chart-
ist editor who sells it you for three-pence. We have read
Marcus ; but his sorrow is not divine. We hoped he would

84 CHARTISM.

turn out to have been in sport : all no, it is grim earnest witli
him : grim as very death. Marcus is not a demon author at
all : he is a benefactor of the species in his own kind ; has
looked intensely on the world's woes, fi'om a Beuthamee Mal-
thusian watch-tower, under a Heaven dead as iron ; and does
now with much longwindedness, in a drawling, snufHing, cir-
cuitous, extremely dull, yet at bottom handfast and positive
manner, recommend that all children of working people, after
the third, be disposed of by ' painless extinction.' Charcoal-va-
pour and other methods exist. The mothers would consent,
might be made to consent. Three children might be left liv-
ing ; or perhaps, for Marcus's calculations are not yet perfect,
two and a half. There' might be ' beautiful cemeteries with
colonnades and flower-pots,' in which the patriot infanticide
matrons might delight to take theu' evening walk of contem-
plation ; and reflect what patriotesses they were, what a cheer-
ful flowery world it was. Such is the. scheme of Marcus ; this
is what he, for his share, could devise to heal the world's woes.
A benefactor of the species, clearly recognisable as such ; the
saddest scientific mortal we have ever in this world fallen in
with ; sadder even than poetic Dante. His is a ?iogod-like sor-
row ; sadder than the godlike. The Chartist editor, dull as
he, calls him demon author, and a man set on by the Poor-
Law Commissioners. What a black, godless, waste-struggling
Avorld, in this once merry England of ours, do such pamphlets
and such editors betoken ! Laissez-faire and Malthus, Malthus
and Laissez-faire : ought not tliese two at length to part com-
pany ? Might we not hope that both of them had as good as de-
livered their message now, and were about to go their ways ?
For all this of the ' painless extinction,' and the rest, is in
a world where Canadian Forests stand unfelled, boundless
Plains and Prairies unbroken with the plough ; on the west
and on the east, green desert spaces never yet made white
with corn ; and to the overcrowded little western nook of
Europe, our Terrestrial Planet, nine-tenths of it yet vacant or
tenanted by nomades, is still crying, Come and till me, come
and reap me ! And in an England with wealth, and means
for moving, such as no nation ever before had. With ships ;

IMPOSSIBLE. 85

with war-sMpg rotting idle, whicli, but bidden move and not
rot, might bridge all oceans. With trained men, educated
to pen and practice, to administer and act ; briefless Barris-
ters, chargeless Clergy, taskless Scholars, languishing in all
court-houses, hiding in obscure garrets, besieging all ante-
chambers, in passionate want of simply one thing. Work ; —
with as many Half-pay Officers of both Services, wearing
themselves down in wretched tedium, as might lead an Em-
igrant host larger than Xerxes' was ! Laissez-faire and Mal-
thus positively must part company. Is it not as if this swell-
ing, simmering, never-resting Europe of ours stood, once
more, on the verge of an expansion without parallel : strug-
gling, struggling like a mighty tree again about to burst
in the embrace of summer, and shoot forth broad frondent
boughs which would fill the whole earth ? A disease but the
noblest of all, — as of her who is in pain and sore travail, but
travails that she may be a mother, and say. Behold, there is a
new Man born !

' True thou Gold-Hofrath,' exclaims an eloquent satu'ical
German of our acquaintance, in that strange Book of his, *
' True thou Gold-Hofrath : too crowded indeed ! Meanwhile
' what portion of this inconsiderable Terraqueous Globe have
' ye actually tilled and delved, till it will grow no more ?
' How thick stands your population in the Pampas and Savan-
' nas of America : round ancient Carthage, and in the interior
' of Africa ; on both slopes of the Altaic chain, in the central

* Platform of Asia ; in Spain, Greece, Turke}'', Crim Tartary,
' the Curragh of Kildare ? One man, in one year, as I have
' understood it, if you lend him earth, will feed himself and

* nine others. Alas, where now are the Hengsts and Alarics

* of our still glowing, still expanding Europe ; who, when

* their home is grown too narrow, will enlist and, like fire-pil-
' lars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable
' living Valour : equipped, not now with the battle-axe and

* war-chariot, but with the steamengine and ploughshare ?

* Where are they ? — Preserving their Game ! '

* Sartor Resartus, b. iii. c. 4.

JMl

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